If you grew up in Malaysia in the 1980s, you sat on cane. Cane dining chairs, cane peacock chairs in the verandah, cane settees that creaked in a satisfying way every time you shifted. Then sometime in the late 1990s it disappeared from fashionable houses, replaced by leather and microfibre that nobody could clean properly in a humid climate.
Cane never left the workshop. We've used it continuously since 2011 — quietly, on bed headboards and chair backs, in a handful of cabinet doors — because nothing else solves the same problem.
What cane does that upholstery can't
It breathes. In a country where the indoor environment is wet for most of the year, an upholstered headboard pressed against a bedroom wall is a slow-cooking petri dish. Mould, dust mites, that faint musty smell that bedroom textiles develop after eighteen months. Cane on a frame, with air circulating through it, has none of these problems.
It is also light. A cane headboard on an oak frame weighs maybe a third of an equivalent upholstered headboard. That matters when you're moving house every two years like most condominium tenants in Mont Kiara and Bangsar.
The Pinterest revival is fine
From 2019 onwards, cane came back hard. Mid-century Scandinavian designs, Australian beach-house aesthetics, neutral interiors with a single cane chair as accent. We don't mind — it pushed our suppliers to keep weaving, and it normalised a material that should never have gone away in this part of the world.
What we'd push back on, gently, is the temptation to use cane decoratively where it has no business being. Cane infill on a bathroom vanity? It'll degrade in two years. Cane on a sofa frame? Yes, but only on the back or sides — not the seat, where it doesn't have the tensile strength to take repeated weight.
Where to use it well
Bed headboards. Chair backs. Cabinet doors in living and dining rooms (never bathrooms, never kitchens unless under a hood). Sliding screen panels between living and dining. Decorative inserts on built-in bookcases.
Who weaves it
Most of our caning comes from a family workshop in Klang that's been at it for three generations. We've used the same supplier for nine years. They hand-weave the panels in the natural English-binder pattern, soak the cane to keep it pliable, and stretch it onto the frame while wet so it tightens as it dries. The result is a panel taut enough to bounce a coin off — and built to last twenty years if you keep it out of direct rain.