Light-Colored Woods

If you are looking for a list of light-colored woods, you have come to the right place. This article will guide you to choose pale woods and light-colored woods.

Light colors are perfect for giving your space an airy and clean aesthetic. Also, the use of pale woods in interior design is very common and makes the interior of the house look bigger. For example, light wooden flooring beaming adds dimension, while darker wood adds contrast.

Light-colored woods can cover a whole gamut of colors including creamy-white, light golden, or anywhere in between.

Light-Colored Wood Types and Species

Some of the most popular light-colored wood types come from the northern hemisphere forests of North America and Europe. Most softwoods are light in color, the color tends to darken with age. Also, the hardwoods are mostly dark. But there are exceptions. We’ll review the most important light-colored wood.

Eastern White Pine

• Common Name: Eastern White Pine
• Scientific Name: Pinus strobus
• Distribution: Eastern North America (also widely grown on plantations throughout its natural range) – wood-database.com
• Color: Heartwood is a light brown and sapwood is a pale yellow to nearly white.

Eastern White Pine is softwood and it’s not very suitable for making furniture.
See Tapes of Wood for Furniture.

This wood is one of the most common and widely used timbers for construction of lumber in the northeast United States.

Western White Pine

• Common Names: Western White Pine, Idaho White Pine
• Scientific Name: Pinus monticola
• Distribution: Mountainous regions of western North America
• Color: Heartwood is a light brown and sapwood is a pale yellow to nearly white.

Common uses of this wood are in making veneer, plywood, crates, boxes, wooden matches, carving, and construction lumber.

White Oak Wood

• Common Name: White oak
• Scientific Name: Quercus alba
• Distribution: Eastern United States
• Color: Heartwood is a light to medium brown, commonly with an olive cast. Paler sapwood is not always sharply demarcated from the heartwood. wood-database.com

If you are looking for hardwood with a light color, white oak wood is a good option. This wood is so widely used in cabinet and furniture making and woodworkers love it for the following features:

• Strong
• Beautiful
• Rot-resistant easy to work
• Economical

Red Oak Wood

• Common Name: Red oak
• Scientific Name: Quercus rubra
• Distribution: The Northeastern United States and Southeastern Canada
• Color: The heartwood of red oak is a light to medium brown, usually with a reddish cast. Although its name is red oak, this wood is not really red and sometimes it is not much different from white oak.
  See Red Colored Woods.

It’s good to know the most popular hardwood in the United States, red oak wood. Common uses of this wood are like white oak.

European White Beech

• Common Name: European Beech
• Scientific Name: Fagus sylvatica
• Distribution: Europe
• Color: European Beech is white to pale cream color, sometimes with a pink or brown hue.

White beech wood is suitable for furniture manufacturing and cabinet making along with joinery parquet strips.

American Hard Maple

• Common Names: Hard maple, sugar maple, rock maple
• Scientific Name: Acer saccharum
• Distribution: Northeastern North America
• Color: The sapwood is creamy white with a slight pinkish brown tinge and the heartwood varies from light to dark reddish brown. Both sapwood and heartwood can contain pith fleck. wood-database.com

Common uses of hard maple are for making flooring, veneer, paper (pulpwood), musical instruments, cutting boards, workbenches, baseball bats, and other turned objects and specialty wood items. Worths to mention, its wood is stronger, stiffer, harder, and denser than all of the other species of maple.

Considering these informations, American hard maple wood is a hardwood with a light color that is very common and widely used.

American Holly Wood

• Common Names: Holly, American Holly
• Scientific Name: Ilex opaca
• Distribution: Eastern United States
• Color: This wood has a very uniform, pale white color with virtually no visible grain pattern. Holly tree is usually being cut during the winter and kiln dried shortly thereafter to preserve the white color of the wood.

Common uses of this wood are for carving, inlay, and making decorative and small wooden items. Not very suitable for making flooring or furniture.

American White Ash

• Common Names: White Ash, American White Ash
• Scientific Name: Fraxinus Americana
• Distribution: Eastern North America
• Color: The heartwood is a light to medium brown color. Bat sapwood of white ash can be very wide, and tends to be a beige or light brown.

Common Uses of American White Ash:

• Flooring
• Millwork
• Baseball bats
• Making tool handles (White Ash has excellent shock resistance, it is one of the most commonly used hardwoods for tool handles like shovels and hammers)
• Suitable for Woodturning

Which Woods Are White?

In this article, you will get acquainted with some light-colored woods. Although some of them use the word “white” in their names (such as white oak or white ash), the color of their wood is not really white!

In fact, there is no white-colored wood! See Natural Wood Colors Chart.
The lightest natural wood available is holly-wood. Holly is known worldwide as the whitest wood available. There are over 200 species of holly growing worldwide, making it easily accessible for everyone. cucamongawoodworking.com/blogs/news/what-is-the-whitest-natural-wood

Which Hardwoods Are Light in Colour?

As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, hardwoods often have darker colored wood, while softwoods are invariably light in color. But as you can see there are a number of species of hardwoods as light-colored woods.

Hardwoods often have higher densities and are stronger than softwoods.
So many carpenters are looking for hard and light-colored wood. Light-colored hardwood species used in many industries include:

• White Oak
• Maple
• Red Oak
• Hickory