Looking around my house, I have 5 major pieces in mahogany: a pencil post bed (a tricky tapered octagon post), a server in the dining room, a drop leaf my wife made and a Chippendale mirror. I also have a coffee table refined a bit to reproduce a clunky old pine table my father-in-law made

I have 4 pieces in cherry: a credenza in a more mid-modern style with some roots in Japanese elements, two bookcases of very different styles, and an end table in curly cherry made years ago.

I have 3 walnut pieces: an end table made years ago, a turned bed, and a drop leaf table. I am building a chest of drawers in walnut currently--I'm slow at it anymore.

I have a dry sink in old yellow pine discovered in a barn where it may have been 100 years old cut. In my cabin, I have a small bedside table in chestnut that someone discovered stashed in a barn probably cut in the 1930's at the end of the chestnut blight. The dealer claimed the boards were the last living in captivity and charged accordingly. I have a small hanging butternut corner cupboard (lovely wood to work) in my cabin also.

My oldest grandaughter has a small hard maple desk on 4 square legs patterned and downsized after the style you might see in a colonial legislative assembly.

Oh, I have a small tilt top table with an oval top in stunning walnut burl, like you might see on the finest shotgun stock.

I have also made a number of weddng gifts of tables, usually with turned legs in walnut or more often cherry.

In short, I simply like to work with very fine figured woods, and I go to great lengths to source to what I want. I've long said that I'm not really a very good craftsman so I need the wood figure to do the heavy lifting, and there is some real truth to that. There was a craftsman from Sweden, James Krenov, whose words influenced me a lot early on. I do regret not building much of anything between, say the early 1980's and 2010 when I built the Chippendale mirror for my then fiancé and now wife. She's the one who pushed my back into this hobby.

You should google James Krenov's work. I don't duplicate his style at all--too cute and not functional really for my spaces--but his approach to allow the wood to express itself in what it is to be really impacted my approach.