I had to specify biscuit joints again last week.
A basic, century-old way of connecting two pieces of wood without screws or nails. I had to call it out, draw it, and ask for it specifically. Because if I didn’t, the default would have been a couple of screws and a line of glue.
This is what happens across the entire market here by default. Joinery work being done quickly, with screws and nails and adhesive, instead of the joints that the craft is actually built on. Dovetails. Mortise and tenon. Dowels. Biscuit. The joints that hold a piece of furniture together for a hundred years instead of ten.
And before anyone says it: yes, most joinery now is MDF and veneer instead of solid wood. That’s fine. MDF is stable, it’s cost-effective, and using less hardwood is, on balance, the more sustainable choice. I specify it constantly. The substrate isn’t the problem. The joints are. You can build a beautiful, long-lasting MDF and veneer cabinet if the joints are right. Dowelled carcass corners. Biscuit-joined fixed shelves where they meet the uprights. The joint is independent of the substrate. It’s the joint that decides how long the piece holds.
It isn’t a question of skill. The joinery teams I work with are very good with their hands. The problem is that nobody insists on these joints anymore. The default has shifted. Cheap is fast and fast is the standard. The dovetail isn’t slow, exactly. It just isn’t the first option anymore, and unless someone asks for it, you don’t get it.
So I ask for it. Every time. On every project.
When I’m working on a kitchen with a heavy run of pull-outs, I’ll specify dowel joints in the carcass corners. When the project is a built-in bookcase or a wall of cabinetry, I’ll specify biscuit joints where the shelves meet the uprights. When the cabinet is fielded and clean and the joints will show, I’ll specify the joint, the spacing, the orientation of the wood. I’ll send the drawing. And then I’ll sit in the workshop with the joinery team and walk through it, all of it, in painstaking detail.
It takes longer. It costs more. I’m not naive about either. But the joint is the difference between a cabinet that survives a family and a cabinet that gets replaced when the kids grow up. A nailed butt joint with glue holds for a few years and then fails. The screws back out. The boards separate. The piece starts to wobble and the doors stop hanging right. You repair it for a while, and then you bin it.
A dovetail joint, properly cut, doesn’t fail. Nothing about it is fashion. It’s mechanical. Two pieces of wood interlock in a way that resists pulling apart for as long as the wood itself holds. There is no glue carrying the load. The geometry does the work.
That’s why it has lasted as a joint for thousands of years across every culture that built furniture. It works. It isn’t a thing the market got rid of because something better came along. It was abandoned because faster was cheaper. That’s the entire reason.
And here’s what I see when a client invests in joinery without insisting on the joints. They pay premium money for a piece that’s held together with hardware-store assembly. The fronts look beautiful. The veneer is right, the proportions are right, the hardware is right. But the MDF carcass is screws and glue. In ten years, the piece looks worn out from the inside out. Not from use. From construction.
That isn’t what residential investment is for.
I keep coming back to a simple test. Is this piece of furniture going to outlast the family living with it, or will it be on the kerb in eight years? If it’s going to outlast them, the joint is what does the work. The finish doesn’t carry the piece. The hardware doesn’t carry the piece. The joints carry the piece.
The same logic applies to construction joinery on a much bigger scale. The way doors are hung. The way panelling is fixed to walls. The way skirting meets the floor. There are right ways to do each of these that have existed for centuries, and there are shortcut versions that hold for a while and then start to fail. I see the shortcut versions everywhere. On expensive projects. In houses where the family has paid eight figures for the build. And five years in, the panelling is moving in its frame and the door is dragging on its hinge and the skirting has a hairline gap that wasn’t there at handover.
None of this is the trades’ fault as people. The standard has slipped. Nobody asks for the right joint, so nobody offers it. The market trains itself to deliver what gets specified, and what gets specified now is “fast and looks right.”
So I ask for the joint.
I bring the drawing. I bring the reference. I bring the patience to walk through it with the team that hasn’t been asked to do it this way for a while. And I bring the willingness to wait the extra week it takes, because the joint is what the work is for. The rest is finish.
Sometimes what I’m pushing back on isn’t the joint at all. It’s something even smaller. A 1mm or 2mm gap at the side of a biscuit-joined shelf where it meets the bookcase upright is just the gap. It’s the joint sitting in place. It isn’t a problem to solve. But the standard instinct in the workshop here is to fill it with silicone before anyone notices. So I tell them no, every single time, and I watch for it on site or it happens by default. The gap is the gap. Leave it.
When you walk into a house I’ve worked on in fifteen years, the cabinet will still be square. The drawer will still slide right. The paneling will still sit flush. You won’t know why, because the joints are inside the work. You don’t see them. You just feel that the room is still right. That the piece is still doing its job.
That’s what I’m trying to put back into this market, one project at a time. Not because it’s a personal style. Because it’s the part of the work that lasts.
Bring back the joints.
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Studio SuCo. A founder-led residential design practice in Dubai. 25 years. Two to four projects at a time. From shell and core to handover.
Designed with intention, delivered with care.
studiosuco.com · @studiosuco · [email protected]
