This 8.5 x 12 inch end-grain cutting board is perfect for a small apartment or a bar. It's striking and absolutely unique.
 
It's an end-grain cutting board which means that instead of being made from strips cut from the face of a board, it is made from pieces cut across the width of the board. That is, when you're looking at a piece of lumber from the side, you're seeing the face grain, and strips running the length of that face are what go into a cutting board. However, when you look at the end of that piece of lumber, you're looking at the end grain, which is much like looking at the end of a bundle of drinking straws. 
 
When you cut strips from the face grain of a board, you see what you're getting; the pattern you see is the pattern that will be in the finished piece. However, end grain is unpredictable in something as well-figured as monkey pod. In this case, instead of laying out an already unpredicible pattern as it came, we rotated and moved the pieces to get to an interesting pattern.
 
End grain is harder to work with than face grain, but the tradeoff is in durability. Because the wood is like a bundle of straws, knife marks don't show up as much as they do with face grain. The board has a juice groove around the outside.
 
As with all of the wood we use, the monkey pod in this board was harvested sustainably. The wood we use is either farmed specifically for use in furniture or comes from trees naturally felled or cut for purposes other than the production of lumber. We will never knowingly use wild-harvested wood.