From Chiang Mai
to Maui, Direct
A Maui company that designs live-edge monkey pod furniture, chooses every slab in Thailand, and keeps it in stock in Wailuku. That's our partner Paul beside a slab nearly ten feet across — one tree, one piece.
"We don't buy furniture from a catalog. We design it, choose the slab ourselves in Chiang Mai, and bring it home to Maui."
Mahana Kai Coastal Living started with a simple frustration: the slab furniture we loved was either a six-month custom order at a mainland maker's price, or an import that had passed through three sets of hands before it reached the island. So we went to the source. We work with a single family workshop in Chiang Mai, Thailand, visit in person, select every slab, and ship by container to our own showroom in Wailuku — so the pieces you see here are on island today, not on a waiting list.
Monkey Pod,
a Short History
Hawaii and Thailand share a tree. It shades our streets and their temples, and it has been the islands' furniture wood for seventy years. Here is how it got to both places, and why we cross the Pacific for it.
One tree, one slab — Chiang Mai
Origins
The rain tree
Monkey pod is Samanea saman, a tree of the tropical Americas that grows fast and wide: eighty feet tall with a canopy that can spread well over a hundred. Its leaflets fold at dusk and before rain, which is why the rest of the world calls it the rain tree. Left alone for sixty or eighty years, the trunk swells to five and six feet across — the only way a single slab can ever be sixteen feet long and four feet wide.
1847
It reaches Hawaii
Two seedlings from Mexico were planted in Honolulu in 1847, and within a generation monkey pod was the shade tree of the islands — over plantation roads, in schoolyards, at Moanalua. By the 1950s and 60s Hawaiian monkey pod bowls, trays, and furniture were the souvenir of a lifetime, and the wood became part of how the islands look. Nearly every kamaʻāina household still has a piece.
Thailand
Jamjuree
The same tree was carried to Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century. In Thailand it is jamjuree, planted for shade along roads and temple grounds and around the universities of Bangkok, and in the north it grows to a size Hawaii rarely sees. Around Chiang Mai, generations of carvers and slab workshops built a craft around it. When a big tree comes down, the slabs go to workshops like the one we partner with.
The wood
Why it is worth a container
Monkey pod heartwood runs from honey gold to deep chocolate, often in the same slab, with a pale band of sapwood along the live edge and an interlocked grain that shimmers when it is finished. It is stable once dried, resists checking better than most tropical hardwoods, and takes an oil finish beautifully. It is the wood Hawaii already loves — we just go to where it grows biggest.
Four Steps,
No Shortcuts
01
Designed on Maui
We decide what the collection needs — lengths, heights, bases, edge treatments — and write the order before we ever get on a plane.
02
Chosen in Chiang Mai
We walk the slab yard with the workshop and pick every slab ourselves, for width, live edge, and figure. What you see on this site is what we stood next to.
03
Built by hand
One family workshop cuts, dries, shapes, and finishes each piece. Weeks per table. No factory line, no veneers, no two alike.
04
Shipped direct to Wailuku
A full container to Kahului Harbor, then straight into our own showroom. Nobody between the workshop and you — which is why our prices look the way they do.
Thailand's Finest
Monkey Pod
Monkey pod — suar in Thailand, the same tree that shades half of Hawaii — grows to enormous size in the north, and the workshop we partner with in Chiang Mai has been cutting and drying it for decades. Slabs four feet wide and sixteen feet long come from a handful of trees a year. We walk the yard ourselves and choose each one for its width, its live edge, and its figure.
Every slab is kiln-dried and hand-finished before it ships, and every table is one slab — never glued-up boards, never veneer. The result is furniture that is structurally sound for generations and impossible to duplicate.
Handmade,
Never Mass-Produced
Every piece is shaped by hand at the workshop using techniques passed down through generations of Thai woodworkers. We set the design — the proportions, the base, the edge treatment — and the craftsmen spend weeks on a single table, following the grain, filling voids with precision, and applying finishes that enhance rather than conceal.
Beyond tables, the same hands carve the sculptural pieces in our collection: root forms, screens, wave carvings that take a single block and a month of work.
Direct
Workshop to Maui
In Stock
Wailuku Showroom
What Direct
Gets You
Most slab furniture in Hawaii is either a custom order from a mainland maker or an import that has been marked up by a distributor, then a wholesaler, then a showroom. Cutting those steps out changes three things.
The price
A ten-foot single-slab table for what a six-foot one costs elsewhere. Same wood, fewer hands in the middle.
The selection
Sixteen-foot slabs, nine-foot rounds, seven-foot chairs — pieces a catalog importer will never carry because they are hard to ship. We ship them.
The next container
Need a specific length, a matched pair, or twelve tables for a restaurant? We write it into the next order and choose the slabs for you in person.
See It in Person
in Wailuku
Every piece on this site is in our showroom at 610 Eluene Place, Wailuku. Showroom visits are by appointment — tell us what you're looking for and we'll have it pulled out and ready.