Stain vs. No Stain

I don't like stain. I don't hate it. Things that have been stained can look quite striking. However, I think that nature gifted us with a broad spectrum of natural wood colors to choose from, and those species' natural colors contribute greatly to the beauty of a piece.

I'm putting this post together to try to give you a window into my design preference. Other people's tastes may differ, which is certainly okay. I'm going to post a few pictures of stained and unstained woods. Hopefully it gives you a sense for some of the things that are out there, though I'm not really going to do the subject justice because there are literally woods of any color of the rainbow (orange, red, purple, white, and black among hundreds, if not thousands, more).

Lot's of pictures after the jump, some of which are kind of big. I'm not sure whether when google makes thumbnails of the pictures for in-text-viewing if it downloads the whole image (I'm inclined to think no), but if it does, then that would eat up 25ish MB-sized chunk of your mobile data. If you open the images separately  however, I'm sure it would load a large image. So proceed informed.