GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

You notice the plywood first. Cross the threshold into Wade Robinson’s Silver Lake home and the space inside the walls seems to gather a breath of air and expand to contain a floor laid in sheets of butter-colored, natural birch plywood. The art on his walls shows off plywood too -- both the frame and what’s inside the frame. The petal-shaped CD case in the corner is cut from plywood. The industrial-style closet chest in his daughter’s room is varnished plywood. The Modernist dresser he made his wife is plywood.

There would be more except that Robinson is a hot item right now as an interior designer and builder, and he has a mountain of commissions to occupy his attention.

“It is so viable and so pliable,” Robinson said of plywood. “If you do it right, it’s art itself.”

There are a few generalizations we can make about plywood these days: First, you see a lot of it around town.

Second, it’s still sometimes a hard sell.

Third, technology is extending its possibilities.

If you smell the ingredients of a “trend,” you’re on to something. Plywood, that lowly industrial workhorse of the lumberyard, is in fashion, again -- not simply as a structural material, but increasingly as a visible part of homes and furnishings.

Somewhere short of everyday mainstream but not all-out daring either, plywood has made the long leap from midcentury 1950s Modernism to an ever more versatile home accent for this millennium. Depending on when you caught wind of it, the trend has been years in the making, or you could imagine that it’s really just starting.

Floors, walls, ceilings, cabinetry, countertops, chairs, tables, even exterior paneling -- it’s hard to argue with wood that is stronger than wood, wood that is more flexible than wood, wood that is more stable than wood, and wood that, pound for pound, gives you a lot more wood for your money -- remembering, of course, that it’s still wood all along.

“I think it’s coming,” said Robinson. “To some extent, it’s here.”

Something else about plywood: It alters the scale of things. A board, even a wide board, is but a slice into the beauty of a tree. A sheet of plywood opens up the tree for our eyes -- a circular girdle peeled from a log and pressed flat into a grained page more expansive than the tree itself.

Robinson’s plywood floors, finished with a clear coating that brings out the sunshine hues of birch, were inspired by the grand dimensions of marble slab floors.

The result is not only the eye-holding drama of 4-by-8-foot panels, wall to wall in an ordinary-sized living space, but simultaneously, Robinson said, “I think I achieved a warm, homey look.” Besides, he added, “It feels good; it makes me feel good.” Not waiting for a cue, Robinson’s 9-year-old daughter, Taylor, emerged from the kitchen to demonstrate plywood’s adaptability as a surface for indoor skating.

Plywood that is on display for the eyes to see, as opposed to the hidden-away construction plywood that forms the hulls of our houses and furniture, might also be a cultural signpost of the age in which we find ourselves, if one is of a mind to think that way.

In an interview, San Francisco-based design historian and writer Dung Ngo offered a review of the contemporary cultural history of plywood, which reached its apogee in the years following World War II: “I would say that plywood had a continuous run from the 1940s to about 1975, when it went into decline. It is not coincidence that the end of the Vietnam War era, where values that we ascribe to plywood -- integrity, honesty, optimism, exuberance -- were in short supply in American culture.”

The coauthor of the authoritative illustrated history of modern plywood furniture, “Bent Ply,” Ngo continued: “In the 1990s there was enough critical distance to 1950s values that such things were appreciated again, at least in our material culture.... Its characteristics are ones that we can describe as values of democratic society. Its beauty lies as much in the inherent nature of wood grains as in the fact that it is available, and appreciated and used by all segments of our society, from factory floors of the working class to the custom high-end cabinetry of millionaires, from the garage woodshops of our weekend warriors to the kitchen countertops of our cultural elites. Plywood has permeated not only our physical homes, but also our cultural psyche.” All said, though, some homeowners still need coaxing.

“I often try to talk people into plywood,” said Robinson. “At first, their jaws drop. To be honest, it’s sometimes hard ... to talk people into plywood. It still has a ‘subfloor’ connotation to it.” Little do they know.

American John Mayo patented plywood in 1865, but the principles of cross-grain wood lamination go back much further -- with evidence of similar techniques found in gravesites in ancient Egypt and early China. Master woodworkers have long used thin shavings of prized wood as veneer over lesser lumber, just one ply short of the three that generally define the minimum for plywood.

Today, the Hardwood Plywood and Veneer Assn., a Reston, Va., trade group of North American manufacturers, maintains a list of 150 species of hardwoods available for decorative plywood, including common red oak, maple and cherry as well as exotic African species such as butterscotch-toned anegre and deep sunset-red bubinga.

Some of these, in particular the popular blond birch from Northern Europe, are constructed with uniform underlying laminations, which invite designers to expose edge grain as visible ornamentation.

This increasing willingness to show off plywood as plywood, by revealing its laminated layers rather than hiding them behind banding or joinery, is seen in furniture, cabinetry, shelving and countertops. “The exposed plywood edge marks the true embrace of this material,” said Ngo. “This is more than a service material, it’s truly something that is celebrated.”

Curt Alt, marketing director for the association, said demand for decorative plywood has “gone up greatly” in the last 20 years, but so has public concern about potentially unhealthy gas releases from formaldehyde adhesives used to bond plywood laminations. At least one manufacturer has announced the elimination of formaldehyde in favor of soy-based glues, and Alt said the change “is in the cards” for others.

In an important sense, plywood is a reaction to consumptive pressures on the world’s natural resources. In recent years, the industry has responded by steadily reducing the thickness of hardwood laminates to as thin as 1/40th or even 1/50th of an inch, stretching precious lumber supplies. A single 14-inch log can now be peeled, with hardly any waste, to produce a ribbon of veneer 360 feet long, enough for 90 sheets of plywood, vastly extending the useful surface area of fine woods, burls and figured grains.

In Pacoima, Phillips Plywood Co. sells not a sheet of common construction-grade plywood. The company’s 100,000-square-foot warehouse is devoted entirely to decorative and hardwood plywood. If that’s not enough selection, customers can pick through veneer sheets of surprising and rare woods, such as richly figured Carpathian elm burl or banded zebrawood, and have their choice custom-laminated to plywood cores for overnight delivery.

Glen Hall, president of Phillips, said that in the last couple of years he has noticed increasing numbers of customers seeking out rustic woods with character such as hickory, pecan and knotty alder, “which is the rage right now.” Even woods that have long been overlooked for their potential are in style, such as quarter-sawn and figured eucalyptus.

To the consumer, the cost savings can be substantial. Finished cherry boards three-quarters of an inch thick typically cost in the range of $5.75 to $6.50 per board foot. At Phillips Plywood, Hall said equivalent cherry in plywood would cost $2.50 to $2.75 per board foot.

“Raw materials are harder and harder to come by, more and more expensive,” said Santa Monica architect Kevin Daly. “That provides the momentum for the development of manufactured products like plywood.”

But beyond economics are matters of emotion and aesthetics too.

“Alchemy,” said Daly. “That’s what is interesting to me about it. Something large and strong and beautiful comes out of relatively delicate constituent elements.” Daly utilized long rows of plywood sheets to clad the exterior of his often-photographed Modernist home in Ocean Park. He extended the plywood indoors as the ceiling of the living area and walls for upstairs bedrooms. Daly’s home showcases plywood furniture too.

“It has a modularity to it,” the architect said about the scale of plywood. In some applications, plywood sheets can serve to enlarge the visual effect, and in others -- such as the exterior of Daly’s home -- individual sheets create a rectangular geometry that breaks up an expansive flat surface.

“It’s like reading the musical score of something. People respond.” Daly expressed no interest in discussing plywood as a trend -- except as a material that lends itself to do-it-yourself projects.

“We have a DIY sensibility now, and at some fundamental level, plywood plays into that. It is transportable. It is transformable.” In his architectural studio, Daly can fill half a table with checkerboard samples of the latest in plywood products, including Finnish plywood impregnated with colored phenolic resins that make the material virtually weatherproof and flooring made with matchstick-wide slivers of wood, turned on their sides and laminated atop standard plywood, providing an ultra-hard, edge-grain surface.

Technological advances like these continue to make plywood more adaptable, in furniture as well as architecture.

“Plywood furniture is not seen as new or novel anymore, and it is now accepted and used in all different kinds of domestic and commercial environments, not just in modern or contemporary interiors,” said Ngo. Beyond the 1950s style of sleek, molded plywood furniture, today’s designers incorporate plywood “in all different styles.”

“Plywood is the product of industrial processes and innovation, and technology will continue to make plywood easier to use, more affordable and cutting edge. New glues and composite techniques will make plywood and plywood furniture stronger, lighter and more durable, and push the envelope of form and design.”

Sometimes, however, the lure of plywood is nostalgia, plain and simple.

When Kevin Cwayna, a physician and urban health consultant, went house hunting in Long Beach, he set his sights on a tract of 1950s Modernist homes designed by architect Cliff May. Then Cwayna waited, inspecting each house that came to market. He looked for a home with the original touches, chiefly natural-colored birch plywood cabinetry and doors. “I waited because I liked the wood,” he explained.

Realtor Doug Kramer, who specializes in this tract called the Ranchos, estimated that a home with such half-a-century-old cabinets could add $25,000 to $50,000 in value to a home today. “The patina and the character, that’s what adds value.”

Cwayna ultimately bought a home in the tract that had many, although not all, of the original cabinets, as well as varnished plywood sliding doors and ceiling panels, the visible surfaces transformed by exposure from a bright piney color to shades of tobacco.

In a thorough remodel that further opened the open-space floor plan, he had new plywood cabinets custom made and finished to fill in where the old ones had been replaced. He carried the aged plywood theme to an island that serves as the boundary for the kitchen and living room.

“It brings warmth to this Modernism. In the 1950s, blond plywood was the ‘new’ construction fabric. People were tired of dark.” Ironically, the plywood that is so coveted today was, in its time, the builder’s way of keeping down costs and maximizing profits.

“Cheap, cheap, cheap -- that’s the dirty secret,” said Cwayna with a laugh. “But it’s beautiful so it doesn’t matter. That’s the best of both worlds.”

Because so much of Southern California’s character was shaped by growth during and immediately after World War II, boom years for plywood, the material is sometimes associated with the very architectural character of the region.

Wartime airplane manufacturers advanced the art of molding plywood, which carried forth in the pioneering Modernist plywood furniture of Southern Californians Charles and Ray Eames. At the same time, architects such as May and Rudolf M. Schindler were known for exposing plywood accents in their farsighted, glass-walled home designs, a theme that reappeared with profound effect later in the work of another famed Southern California architect, Frank Gehry.

“Los Angeles is the archetypical plywood city,” said historian Ngo. “Plywood is one of the defining characteristics of Los Angeles Modernism.” Then, as again now, plywood combined economy with flexibility on a bold scale to add beauty to life in the very place that pioneered “lifestyle.”

Times staff writer John Balzar can be reached at john.balzar @latimes.com.

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A veneer of beauty

Hardwood and decorative plywood is composed of layers, or plys, of wood veneer laid over each other or over a core of wood, particle board or hardboard, according to the American National Standards Institute. The layers are joined by an adhesive, using pressure and usually heat.

Except for special purpose plywood, such as those meant to be molded, the grains of alternative layers are laid at right angles. Generally, plywood is defined as having three or more plys. Material with only two layers is referred to as veneer.

Plywood is commonly sold in thickness of one-eighth inch to 1 inch, with three-fourths inch the most commonly produced by domestic mills.

Plywood is significantly more “stable” than wood boards. As humidity rises and falls, a sheet of hardwood plywood may be expected to swell and contract 0.1% to 0.2%, according to Nick Engler’s guidebook, “Woodworking Wisdom.” By contrast, common hardwood boards move as much as 6% to 11% against the grain.

To generalize: North America hardwood plywood has thinner faces and thicker inner plys. Scandinavian plywood typically is composed of plys of equal thickness. Plywood manufactured on the West Coast often uses softwood cores, and Eastern plywood commonly utilize poplar, a hardwood.

-- John Balzar