Timber as Storytelling — Briggs Veneers & Killing Matt Woods
Where timber meets its match — in the hands of a designer who understands that a material is never just a surface, but a story waiting to be told. Across tearoom nostalgia, pastry-inspired wit, and retro Chinese glamour, Killing Matt Woods and Briggs Veneers share a conviction that the most extraordinary spaces begin with the most honest materials.
There is a designer working out of Sydney’s inner west whose work defies easy categorisation. Matt Woods – the singular force behind Killing Matt Woods – is an industrial designer by training, a postgraduate in sustainable architecture by conviction, and a hospitality designer by reputation. Featured in The New York Times Style Magazine Australia and published in Design Milk, Dezeen, Archdaily, Est Living, Dwell, and The Local Project, Woods has spent more than fifteen years building a body of work that is as difficult to imitate as it is to categorise. A winner of the Eat Drink Design Awards Best Restaurant Design and the Interior Design Excellence Awards Designer of the Year, his hospitality projects in particular carry a quality that is immediately recognisable: a wit, a warmth, and a material intelligence that makes every space feel like it could only ever exist as it is.
Briggs Veneers has had the privilege of supplying natural timber veneer across three of Killing Matt Woods’ most recent and celebrated hospitality projects. Each one tells a different story. Each one tells it through timber.
Flora, Newtown - The Tearoom Reimagined
Some spaces announce themselves. Flora does the opposite. Tucked along Australia Street in Newtown, this character-filled vegetarian diner by Killing Matt Woods draws you in with the gentle warmth of a room that feels as though it has always been there – as though it predates the street it sits on, the suburb it belongs to, and perhaps even the decade you find yourself in.
The reference is the 1950s tearoom; superlative timber panelling, cosy dining booths, a soft golden palette that wraps the room like late afternoon light. It is a space that does not simply evoke comfort; it embodies it.
The food nourishes, and so does the room.
Briggs Veneers’ Tasmanian Oak, quarter cut and slip matched, is the material at the heart of this nostalgia. The slip match; leaves placed sequentially without flipping, allows the fine, straight grain of the quarter cut to flow across the panelling in a steady, repeating rhythm, the traditional joining method a deliberate nod to the heritage joinery of another era. It is craftsmanship worn honestly, without pretension. A room designed to feel timeless, deeply comfortable, and entirely real.
Merrylands Snack Shoppe - When Timber Becomes Food
There are interiors that reference food, and then there are interiors that become it. The Merrylands Snack Shoppe falls firmly into the latter – a space where the design concept is worn so lightly, so wittily, that it only reveals itself on closer inspection, like the layers of a perfectly laminated croissant.
This is Killing Matt Woods operating at the height of his powers – the kind of conceptual clarity that looks effortless precisely because it has been so carefully resolved. The timber does the work. Briggs Veneers’ Spotted Gum; quarter cut, joined in a deliberate mismatch, lines the interior in alternating bands of light and shadow that unmistakably echo the glazed, golden-to-amber tonal shifts of a croissant straight from the oven. It is local Australian timber doing something quietly extraordinary: evoking the warmth of a patisserie through nothing more than the honest character of its own grain.
Fun without being frivolous. Refined without being earnest. A nod to the craft of pastry making, rendered entirely in the craft of timber.
Grandfathers, Sydney - Silk, Resin, and Retro Glamour
If Flora is warmth and Snack Shoppe is wit, then Grandfathers is pure theatre: an ode to retro casino glamour and the decadence of Australia’s beloved regional Chinese restaurant heritage, celebrating an era when dining out was an event in itself and every room was dressed for the occasion.
For this project, Briggs Veneers supplied Marri – a rare and deeply characterful timber from the forests of Western Australia, and one of the most distinctive veneers in the Briggs collection. Its surface is animated by kino veins: dark, wavy lines formed by the tree’s own reddish-brown resin, produced as a natural defence against bushfire, drought, and physical stress over decades.
These sinuous markings move across the grain with an almost organic restlessness, shifting and shimmering with the iridescent, layered quality of antique silk wallpaper. Rich, textural, and quietly exotic – the material equivalent of a silk-lined dining room straight from a 1980s Cantonese banquet hall.
It is a timber shaped by survival. In Grandfathers, that character finds its perfect home.
The finest design relationships are not forged in a single project, but deepened across many – each one a new invitation to push the material further, tell a richer story, and discover what becomes possible when a designer and a supplier share the same uncompromising standard.
This is what it looks like when that kind of trust is built over time.
On Material & Meaning
What unites these three projects – and what defines the Killing Matt Woods ethos more broadly – is a conviction that design must mean something. Woods calls his guiding philosophy “designing for deconstruction” – a way of building spaces that can be broken down, reused, and given new life at the end of a project’s life. It is a philosophy born of the realities of the hospitality industry, and one that demands an intimate knowledge of materials – not just how they look, but how they behave, how they age, and how they can be responsibly handled at every stage of their life.
Timber veneer, specified and applied with the care that Killing Matt Woods brings to every project, is precisely the kind of material this philosophy calls for. Natural, renewable, endlessly characterful, and, in the right hands, capable of telling stories that no other surface can.
At Briggs Veneers, we are proud to have played a part in three of those stories.