The Materials Behind Every Label Home Piece
Every piece we make starts with a material, not a drawing. Long before a hook, shelf, or tray takes its final shape, it's a length of scaffold board pulled from a construction site, a piece of salvaged timber with fifty years of history in its grain, or new cast iron waiting to be paired with wood that's lived a previous life. Understanding what we work with, and why, is understanding what Label Home actually is.
Reclaimed Wood: The Foundation
Reclaimed timber is where Label Home began, and it's still at the heart of what we do. Most of it comes to us as scaffold board: dense, weathered softwood that's spent years supporting builders on sites across Glasgow and beyond. It arrives scarred, painted, sometimes still carrying the marks of the trade it served. We don't sand those marks away completely. A little bit of that history stays in the finished piece on purpose.
Alongside scaffold board, we source salvaged timber more broadly, floorboards, joists, and structural offcuts, wherever we can find wood with genuine age and character rather than the uniform look of anything fresh off a mill. Working here at the Barclay Curle Complex in Whiteinch, on a site with its own shipbuilding history, that connection between material and place matters to us. It's part of why the wood we choose isn't just structural. It's a small piece of Glasgow's industrial past, repurposed for a home.
Much of our timber comes from Glasgow Wood, a local supplier we've built a working relationship with over time. Sourcing close to home keeps the supply chain short and lets us have a real say in the quality and character of the boards we get, rather than working from a catalogue with no context. We'll be writing a dedicated blog soon on Glasgow Wood and what that partnership looks like in practice, so keep an eye out for that if you're curious about where the material really starts.
New Wood: Where Reclaimed Can't Reach
We're honest about where reclaimed timber has its limits. Some designs need consistency of grain, a specific dimension, or a strength that a weathered board simply can't guarantee. In those cases, we use new wood, and we're always clear about which is which in our product descriptions. Precision matters here: getting the wood type right isn't a small detail, it's part of being straight with the people buying from us.
New timber also lets us push into cleaner, more contemporary shapes without compromising the durability the pieces need. It sits alongside the reclaimed range rather than replacing it, giving us the flexibility to design pieces the reclaimed stock alone couldn't support.
Metal: New Cast Iron and Salvaged Fittings
Metal plays a supporting role in most of our pieces, brackets, fixings, and structural elements that pair with the wood. Our cast iron fittings are new, not antique, and we say so plainly. Cast iron has a way of looking like it's been salvaged even when it hasn't, and we'd rather be accurate than let that ambiguity do the work for us.
Where genuinely salvaged metal fittings come our way, old brackets, hardware, or industrial offcuts, we use them too, always distinguished clearly from the new stock. The mix of reclaimed timber with newly cast, purpose-made ironwork is often what gives a piece its finished, considered feel: history in the wood, precision in the metal.
3D Printing: A New Direction
The newest material in our range isn't reclaimed at all. Our Colour Edit collection, bold geometric wall hooks in matte black, red, orange, and white, is 3D printed, and it marks a real departure for us. It's a chance to work in clean, repeatable geometric forms that wood and metal can't easily produce, and to bring colour into a range that's largely been defined by natural tones and raw materials.
3D printing is still an area we're exploring rather than a settled part of the process. It sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from scaffold board with decades of weathering, but the instinct behind it is the same: take a material, understand what it can do, and shape something considered from it. Where reclaimed wood carries the past into a room, 3D printed detailing is about what's possible now, and where we might take the range next.
Repurposed Materials: The Wider Principle
Beyond wood and metal, we're always looking at what else can be given a second life. Almost anything can be repurposed if you're willing to look at it differently, and that curiosity is really the thread that runs through everything we make. It's less a fixed list of materials and more a way of working: find something with genuine substance, understand what it's capable of, and build from there rather than starting with a blank sheet of new stock.
That's what separates a Label Home piece from something mass-produced. It's not just the finish. It's knowing where the material came from, whether that's a Glasgow scaffold site, a salvage yard, or a spool of filament, and being honest with you about which is which.
All Label Home pieces are handmade in our Whiteinch workshop and stocked in person at Scottish Design Exchange on Sauchiehall Street. Browse the full range on our shop page, or read more about how it all started on our About Us page.