Entries by terry25

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year   We hope that you have all had a great 2025. We also hope that you have a chance to take a break over the Festive Season, wherever you are in the world, and that next year is even better for you. Our focus this year has been […]

We floored the Taj Mahal!

The Taj Hotel, formally the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, in Mumbai is an iconic building with a storied history. It was built by the Tata family patriarch, Jamshedji, in the late 19th Centrury, opening in 1903. It was conceived as a luxury hotel equal to the best in Europe at the time. Its architecture drew […]

Building a Manufacturing Legacy

When Terry Newman founded Ecquality Timber Products in 1997 in Canberra, Australia, he made a bold shift—from diplomacy to entrepreneurship. What began as a trading-focused venture rooted in Terry’s cultural fluency and strong ties with Japan gradually evolved into a highly specialised flooring manufacturer distinguished by its craftsmanship, international reach, and commitment to design. The […]

Proof! Wood is better for you.

For centuries, people have instinctively recognised that natural materials make us feel better. Timber, in particular, brings a sense of calm, warmth and authenticity to the spaces we inhabit. Until recently, though, this connection between timber and wellbeing was largely anecdotal—a matter of personal experience and aesthetic preference rather than empirical fact. That is now […]

The Quality Dilemma in an Uninformed Market

A good client of ours just emailed me in response to a quotation, “Wow, that sounds expensive for smallish boards. It sounds like a wide board price”. As a China-based high-end producer we are really up against it. We are a lot cheaper than our European competitors like-for-like, but we are far more expensive than […]

Let’s Tessellate

One of the things I enjoy about parquetry is the challenge that comes with client requests for new patterns. This is usually in the form of a diagram of something that someone has seen and thinks is cool. One challenge is confirming that the design will work.  Is it practical to manufacture? All makers know […]

It has been a long time. 好久不见了。お久しぶりです。

It has been a very long time since I posted anything on my blog. Like everyone, our company, our lives and our habits were seriously disrupted from the moment the pandemic started. My second last post was a week before the pandemic was publicly acknowledged.  At the time I thought the Year of the Rat […]