Can cutting down a tree be the greener choice?
Composite decking, plastic mixed with wood fibre, is sold to architects as the sustainable choice, and many have bought the story. ENC Solid Wood sells real Indonesian solid wood, and I co-founded it to win them back.
A mission to clear wood’s name
Wood has long been cast as the enemy of the forest: every board is a tree cut down, so the green choice must be something else. Composite decking, plastic mixed with wood fibre, built its marketing on that idea. Many architects now specify it as the eco-friendly option, and solid wood is left looking irresponsible.
The research says otherwise, as long as the wood is sourced responsibly. A board holds the carbon its tree absorbed for as long as it is in use, and a forest that is harvested and replanted keeps growing new trees. Solid wood can be sanded, refinished and reused. Composite is still plastic, bonded to its fibre and hard to recycle at the end of its life.
The problem was never wood itself. It is wood from forests that are never replanted, or whose origin no one can prove. ENC’s mission is to clear wood’s name by sourcing it responsibly, one architect at a time.
Wood with an address
Indonesia holds some of the world’s richest tropical forests, and some of the hardest to manage. Illegal logging, land cleared for plantations and fire keep shrinking them, and a timber permit doesn’t always tell the truth about where a tree was cut. For most buyers, the origin of a board is taken on trust.
We traced every species in the catalogue back to its region, as far as our suppliers and their paperwork could tell us. Not yet as precise as we want it to be. Verifying origin from forest to board is part of the future plan.
A catalogue of photos and type
Each species gets one page that lists every product with its full spec: finishing, width, height, length range, profile and common use. The design language is photos and typography only, with no outlines, no rounded corners and no colour blocks. Headings are set in Inter Tight, body text in Inter, and one green marks anything active.
The photography is ENC’s main asset, so product photos can’t be dragged, right-clicked or long-pressed to save on a phone.
The whole platform is one Next.js app on Supabase: the public catalogue, and an admin area behind a login. Product pages are cached for a day, and a product edited in Supabase can be republished straight away.
Renders as the way in
Arguments alone rarely change a specification. Architects decide inside their 3D models, long before anything is ordered, so that is where ENC has to be. Every product comes with a free texture pack: a 4K PBR material made from a photo of a real board, edited into a seamless texture in Photoshop and checked in Blender.
The render is only a tool. Once real wood is in the design the client sees, the conversation starts from wood instead of composite.
The six maps in one pack, cropped from the 4096px originals. The ZIPs are served from the site’s own hosting rather than Supabase Storage, to keep the project inside Supabase’s free egress limit.
Every download is a lead
The pack is free, but not anonymous. Downloading it asks for a name, company and phone number, plus four quick questions: field of work, project scope, how they found ENC and when the project starts. The password then arrives on WhatsApp within 24 hours, so a sales conversation has already started.
Visitors who filled in the form skip it for the next 30 days, but every repeat download is still logged. Sales can see who keeps coming back, and for which products.
In the admin, downloads are grouped per person by phone number, with their answers attached. Filters on product, date and each answer narrow the list down to, say, landscape architects starting within six months. One button exports a CSV. Another, for the super admin only, removes repeated downloads: it runs as a dry run first and shows the count before anything is deleted.
Two sides, one app
Architects browse the catalogue without an account. ENC’s team works behind a login, and row-level security in Postgres decides what each role can see: staff only get the projects they created or were given, admins also see leads and settings, and only the super admin can delete. Public sign-up is switched off, so every account is created by hand.
Quotes that keep their history
Every client project gets a folder, and every quote lives inside it. There are two kinds: material, and installation (jasa pasang). Each new quote takes the next number in its project, so Q/2026/09/03/M-3 is the third material quote of the third project in September 2026.
A new version can be a revision of a quote already sent, linked back to the one it replaces. It can also be a parallel option, Ulin against Bengkirai, so the client can compare packages. Status is tracked per quote, so one option can be accepted while its sibling is rejected.
Line items follow how a site is measured: the real area plus a waste percentage gives the quantity to ship. Discounts are a percentage or a fixed amount with their own label, and shipping is priced per truck trip. The PDF is generated in the browser from the same data. Terms and bank details come from the company settings unless a quote overrides them.
Invoices paid in terms
Building projects here are paid in termin: a down payment, then instalments as the work progresses. One invoice can bill several accepted quotes, each on its own schedule. Below, material is billed 70 / 30 / 0 and installation 50 / 0 / 50 across three terms. Amounts are rounded cumulatively, so each quote’s terms add up to its grand total exactly.
Terms are issued and paid in order: term 2 can’t be issued until term 1 is paid. Each payment produces a receipt that shows the balance at that moment, not today’s.
Guide book for architects and users
Industrial Design
Future plan
Today ENC trades and installs wood for architectural projects. The long-term plan is to own a plantation, managed the way Finland manages its forests: planted, harvested and replanted in cycles, so cutting a tree is part of growing the forest rather than losing it.