Used, In Excellent Condition

“If it was good enough to put on the hull of a ship, it was good enough to put a steak on it,” said Richard Cohen, Dansk’s former head of sales, in reference to the thousands of teakwood carving boards he sold throughout the 1970’s. “If you used it—and didn’t abuse it—it lasts forever.” The five, 50-year-old, Jens Quistgaard-designed carving boards Richard still frequently uses are, seemingly, on track for forever.

So are many of the other original Dansk teak products. On eBay, the search query “Dansk teak” yields more than 3,500 results, including ice buckets, serving trays, salad bowls, and the highly collectible peppermills. Despite many of these items exceeding a half-century in age, it’s common, if not expected, for these listings (much like Richard’s carving boards) to denote that its teak remains in “excellent condition”—a claim each listing’s accompanying photos nearly always support.

This durability isn’t some happy accident. As Richard mentioned, teak—thanks to its tight grain and high oil content—is naturally water repellant, long making it a shipbuilder’s preferred wood. While salad bowls won’t endure the aquatic pounding of high seas travel, kitchens are wet. Sinks exist. Meaning, for Dansk, the more a wooden kitchen item could withstand moisture, the better. “We approached teak as a functional product,” Richard said.

“And it had character and it would age nicely,” added Barry Ginsburg, the former President of Dansk. The character—a deep, omnipresent grain coursing through every inch of its smooth and impossibly sturdy surface—is unrelenting. Aging nicely, however, requires some, albeit relatively minimal, effort. “Teak needs to be oiled periodically,” Barry said. “You can’t put it out in zero degree humidity in the desert and expect that it’s not going to dry up.”

For Richard, whose teak collection includes a small and large ice bucket, eight serving trays, four peppermills, and the aforementioned five carving boards, maintenance is bifurcated. “I oil my teak with mineral oil at least twice a year,” Richard told me. “For pieces that we use frequently, I might oil them six times a year—but that’s my own fetish.”

Although teak requires some maintenance, per Richard, Dansk’s initial success with the wood came in response to their customers’ waning interest in a fussier material. “In the seventies, the people I knew getting married and starting to make money wanted to move away from sterling silver plates and accessories—so they all bought Dansk.”

Fifty years later, teak kitchenware—due in part to a resurgent interest in mid-century design—is, again, in vogue. Marrying durability with beauty, consumers, like peppermill collectors Alex Severin and Maren Lankford (and Christopher Walken’s character in Severance), entrust these highly-functioning pieces of kitchen equipment to double as interior design pieces. “They’re little wooden sculptures,” Maren said during our recent interview.

Consumers new to teak will find that the wood Dansk used throughout the 60’s and 70’s is different from what’s available today. For much of the 20th century, the world’s teak predominantly came from four countries—Burma, Laos, Thailand, and India. However, due to rampant deforestation and serious human rights concerns, old-growth teak (which has the tightest grain and darkest color) harvested from those nations has effectively vanished from the market. In turn, today’s teak, which typically comes from plantations spread throughout the globe, is often harvested younger, therefore sporting a lighter color and more dispersed grain.

While, for good reason, its color has shifted, teak’s durability persists. The wood remains water-resistant, shapeable, and—to the touch—undeniably strong. Or, just as Richard described Dansk’s teak from fifty years ago, “It’s functional and it works.”

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