Hi
We are looking for a large dining table & 10 chairs and will be visiting both Bangkok or Singapore next month. I was wondering whether anyone could recommend any good furniture stoes in either location that would ship to the UK? Indicative ideas of cost would also be helpful!
Thanks
Cathy

Bangkok will be less expensive than Singapore, but where to buy depends on exactly what you are looking for. Any furniture store will ship. Expect to pay more for shipping than for the furniture.

Singapore is awash with furniture stores featuring both rosewood (mostly formal Chinese style designs) and teakwood in a huge variety of designs. The price range is very wide. The teak mostly comes from Burma and Indonesia. If you are thinking about buying teak, be very careful. Even the furniture that is "kiln dried" can crack when you move it from the humidity of SE Asia to the dry, heated and airconditioned homes in the UK.
As Kathie stated, the shipping will definitely cost more than the furniture. I'm not sure what's available in the UK, but there is a quite a bit of nice furniture from this region that is now available in the US at fairly reasonable prices. You might want to check around there before you decide to make the investment.
If you tell me more specifically what you are looking for, I can recommend some reputable stores in Singapore.

Bangkok. Mah Boon Krong, fifth floor.

Sometimes Chatuchak market, Back to the Skytrain, the left end of the market some distance in.

Chinatown.

Most shopping malls will have furniture stores but it is a matter of shopping around for the cheapest price, and the cheapest shipping.

Thanks a lot for your help.
We are looking for a fairly contemporary design (not rosewood)I am slightly nervous about the comments on cracking though!

Cathy

I haven't had any major cracks and almost everything in my place is wood. It didn't even crack this past summer in 112 degrees of heat and no air conditioning. Happy travels!

I've been lucky as well and had no cracks in the many pieces of teak we purchased in Singapore. But we have been very careful about where we make our purchases.
I know lots of people who have had furniture crack when they move it into airconditioning, which removes all humidity from the air. that's what causes the cracking....when the wood becomes ultra-dry.
I just visited a friend in the US who bought a TV cabinet here in Singapore and it was fine the whole 4 years she lived here. Now after the cabinet has spent a few months in the US, you can almost watch tv without opening the doors of the cabinet!
Just be careful about the source of the wood and how it was treated before being made into furniture.

Hi
Thanks for your responses. The room we will be putting the furniture in will have air con but living in the UK it won't be used for most of the year!!Any recommendations as to places to buy good teak that is unlikely to crack please?
Cathy

Cathy, no one can guarantee you that your furniture won't crack. The problem isn't temperature, it's humidity. And while air conditioning takes humidity out of the air and can crack furniture, the greater danger is that the humidity is even lower in places where you have to heat your house in the winter. So in the UK, the problem won't be the summer, but the winter.

We did come accross a fantastic furniture factory just outside Bangkok a couple of years ago. I will look for their details and post when I find the info.

I can attest that it is the dry heat, not the air con, that is the issue. I moved to Switzerland for a few years after living in Hong Kong and Singapore and did not have any air con at all in my flat in Switzerland. However, the heat in the flat did cause several of my teak pieces to crack in places. Although air con is certainly drying too, we live in it here 8 months out of the year and the furniture doesn’t crack, but that’s because the relative humidity is much higher; in Singapore some people have it on all year round in their home, yet the furniture doesn’t crack.

The teak seems to be to be about the worst, almost all my furniture is from Asia and the other pieces held up OK while I was in Switzerland with only some minor cracking. The shopkeepers will tell you they can “treat” it by putting it in a special room, but that is frankly a nonsense sales pitch, because the minute you get it into a non-tropical/humid environment, the problems begin. If you look at wood pieces that are not teak, you may be better off. Huanghuali is a very dense Chinese wood, albeit furniture made from it is very expensive. Rosewood, elm and mahogany are also used, and you can often find Chinese-style dining tables in rosewood or mahogany, very clean-lined like a Ming or Ching dynasty period. Also, if the teak is very thickly varnished, you may not have as much cracking.

I would not let this completely discourage you, but would agree with the others that it is really easier and cheaper at this point to buy stuff in the US. I am AMAZED when I go to the US and see prices on new Asian furniture; and I believe you will find the same to be true in the UK. Unless you want to buy a unique antique piece, if you are talking about new furniture, IMO you are better off buying it at home because shipping it from here is quite expensive. More importantly, the pieces will have had a chance to adjust to the climate at the dealers cost, and the cracking that is going to happen will have occurred before you buy it. It generally happens in the first few months as the piece dries out in the new climate, it doesn’t last forever.

If you still want to do this, do a LOT of shopping before you leave home so you have an idea of what a good price would be in Bangkok and Singapore, esp. after you add in shipping, and don’t forget that you will most likely have to pay customs/duty on the piece when it arrives as well; because it would not be includable in your duty-free allowance of items you bring back with you. Make sure the shipping cost quoted is “door to door” (i.e. right to your house), and not “door to port” which means YOU have to go collect it at the nearest port, which could be hours from where you live and this could cost you quite a bit as well. Always insure the piece and pay by credit card for the piece and the shipping so the credit card company can help you in case the shipment gets lost.

We've shipped furniture from Japan and Korea to UK. No problem with cracking, but the back board of one of the chests warped a bit--assumedly because of humidity during shipping or storage at the dock. It was either cedar or pine, not teak.
Just one more thing you might want to check is UK customs, which can be hefty. We got our shipment as a part of relocation, so my employer kindly picked up the tab. You never know--looks like HMR Customs is suddenly realising that weak $ is encouraging lots of people to shop abroad and getting a little bit more strict.

Japan and Korea are NOT the tropics and don't have the humidty issues that you find in Singaore and Bangkok. They have heat in their homes and longish winters. Korean furniture is in fact built to take the floor heating which is common there. It's a totally different thing than buying tropical hardwood furniture.

Agree...Japan and Korea are not the same at all. We have brought some small items to Japan from Bali, and one of them cracked...still looks nice and gives it an "old" kind of appearance...but still, the crack was not there until after the first Japanese winter. I have friends who import furniture, among other things, from Bali, Vietnam and Thailand, and they have things crack all the time...not everything, but it is enough of the time that 1. they told me about it and 2. they told me they factor the losses from cracking into the prices of everything they sell. They have a cut price sale of damaged goods every spring. Most of the damages are cracks that developed over the winter in the shop. A few things were damaged during shipping.

Japan is very humid, but room heating dries out the air much more than air conditioning does.