In place of marble or granite chips set in cement, Foresso casts wood offcuts, shavings and sawdust into a binder to create a sheet material for worktops, tabletops, splashbacks, joinery and wall surfaces.
Foresso terrazzo is the product most people mean when they search for timber terrazzo. London designer Conor Taylor started the company in 2016 after watching high-grade wood waste routinely burned or pulped because its size or shape made it awkward to reuse.
What Foresso Timber Terrazzo is
Foresso is a cast sheet material. Wood offcuts – planing shavings, sawdust, the ends of oak beams – are combined with a binder of cement, resin and pigment, cast onto a plywood substrate, and hand-finished with a hardwax oil. The wood is the aggregate that would normally be crushed stone. Key to the material is leaving the grain, knots and workshop marks visible. The standard sheet is supplied on an 18mm birch plywood backing and sealed with oil; the wood is FSC-certified, sourced from carpenters, sawmills and a prefabricated-housing partner whose oak-beam ends feed the mix.
Foresso works with industrial waste streams rather than consumer waste, which the company notes is the more consistent and traceable source: the offcuts arrive from known factory environments rather than an unsorted recycling stream. However, formulations may have changed since first published.
Colours and finishes
Foresso is made to order in a range of named colourways, most built on oak or London plane with a tinted binder: White, Ivory Oak, Pewter Oak and Chocolate Oak among them, from pale and linear to deep tone-on-tone. Bespoke colour and wood combinations are available on request. Edges can be finished with a matching Foresso edge, metal or laminate, or left as raw plywood.
What it's used for
The material suits interior surfaces in both commercial and domestic settings. A Foresso worktop is the most common application – in kitchens and bathrooms – along with splashbacks and tabletops, and the sheets also work for Foresso flooring, joinery, retail and hospitality fit-outs, and wall surfaces. Foresso, UK-based and manufacturing in Britain, has surfaces specified in projects across more than 24 countries – so while Foresso is a UK company, international specification is well established. Australian specifiers and renovators should factor import and made-to-order lead time into early planning.
Why it matters
Foresso is an example of a waste stream turned into a considered finished material rather than a downcycled filler:
- Circular by design: The wood is a by-product that would otherwise be burned or pulped. Foresso runs an end-of-life scheme – returned boards are repaired and reused where possible, cut and sold as seconds where not, and finally reground in-house and cast into new sheets, keeping the material in circulation.
- Traceable inputs: Industrial rather than consumer waste, from named sources, which makes the provenance of a given sheet knowable.
- Character over uniformity: Because it’s handmade from natural inputs, every sheet differs, and the grain and marks are read as the finish.
Specification considerations
The honest counterpart to a handmade recycled material is that it behaves like one. Panels are made to order, so lead time applies. Sheets are hand-finished: they must be oiled or lacquered after any cutting or processing, edges are rough from the factory and need trimming, and there is natural variance in flatness, tone and small inclusions both between sheets and within a single sheet. Sheets are sensitive to cold and can arrive slightly bowed, though they carry enough flex to be fixed flat on installation. A specifier should assess a physical sample before committing, since tone and texture read differently in person than on screen.
