I’m going to risk saying this, but sometimes using boards of wood that still have their natural edge in tact (aka ‘slabs’) can take a maker down the wrong design path. ‘Fred Flintstone’ is the term that has been applied to some examples of furniture that are made by placing one slab on top of other slab sections — the look can be a bit bulky.
But the natural edge of a piece of wood really is a beautiful thing. You get a sense of the tree, where it all came from and the environment it spent its life growing in, before the final chop came.
Anyway, the images below were snapped on a trip to Japan last year. Natural-edged sections of timber used as signs in this way can be elegant way to use wood.