Reclaimed Elm Finds a Home in Room & Board’s Hensley Collection

Elm was once the defining tree of American streets, its sweeping canopies and high arching branches lining city blocks and casting shaded corridors across the country for generations. Then Dutch elm disease arrived: a fungal infection spread by bark beetles, it moved steadily from the 1930s through the 1970s, wiping out tens of millions of trees and pushing the furniture industry toward more reliably supplied species. What remained were the trees that managed to persist in urban environments, many of them now a century old, most of them aging out of safety and eventually taken down by the cities that once planted them.

Room & Board has spent the better part of a decade making sure that's not where the story ends. Through its Urban Wood Project, active since 2018 and responsible for diverting 365 trees from the waste stream in 2025 alone, the company has developed the partnerships to work with reclaimed wood at scale—and to do something it has never done before: add a reclaimed elm option to an existing collection. Elm's interlocked grain and dramatic patterning made it the predominant furniture wood of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; its scarcity since has only deepened its appeal.

A Material With a Story
Hensley, a storage collection that has been a Room & Board staple for over a decade, offered the right home for it. Inspired by mid-century design and crafted by Shell Lake Woodcrafters in northern Wisconsin, the collection was selected as the first pilot for reclaimed elm—a decision shaped in part by geography. The elm comes from Wudeward Urban Forest Products working primarily in the greater Milwaukee area, a natural match for Shell Lake's workshop to the north. Available across the full collection at the same price as walnut, the material brings a character that sets it apart from anything else in the lineup. 

"Elm that grows in sidewalks and city streets is particularly beautiful because those trees are subjected to inconsistent sunlight, air pollution, salt, and a hundred other unique factors that cause the trees to grow very differently than they would in a forest setting," says Brian Linehan, Merchandising and Design Manager at Room & Board. "Unique grain structure, vibrant calico highs and lows, and interesting branch patterning allows us to celebrate the natural character of these century-old beauties."

Reclaimed elm also gives the collection a genuinely distinct material identity. "Another straight-grained blonde wood would likely get confused with maple or white oak, but there is no mistaking reclaimed elm," Linehan says. "It provides a perfect way for the collection to appeal to an entirely different customer or be used in very differently designed spaces." Building the collection around a material neither Shell Lake nor Room & Board had worked with before required what Linehan calls "a labor of love" — the kind of trust between manufacturing partners that only years of shared work can produce. "We had to do some testing and exploration to understand what we might need to consider during production. Fortunately, Shell Lake was up for the task and excited to learn and explore with us."

Designing for the Long Term
Hensley was a deliberate choice for this first foray. With over a decade of photography, customer reviews, and design familiarity behind it, the collection offered the strongest possible foundation for bringing a material as distinctive as reclaimed elm into the lineup. "Adding a reclaimed wood option to a best-selling collection provides the best opportunity to maximize use of this sustainable option," says Linehan, adding that focusing on an established collection allowed the team to direct its energy toward the raw material itself—its sourcing, transportation, and supply chain.

The initiative reaches further still. Room & Board is providing a $10,000 grant to support the University of Minnesota's Survivor Elm Project, which is working to propagate trees with resistance to Dutch elm disease, along with a $10,000 scholarship for forestry students. "Wood is the material we use most, so we feel a responsibility to support thriving forests," says Emily McGarvey, Director of Sustainability at Room & Board. "Supporting the research at the University of Minnesota helps to ensure that future generations will be able to enjoy a diverse urban canopy, and that we can continue to be proud stewards of the environment and our communities." Room & Board intends to bring reclaimed options into other existing collections, building the model into the broader portfolio rather than treating it as a specialty category.