Colour that lives in the layers, not on the surface.
Look at the surface of most of our pieces and you'll see natural, warm-toned birch plywood. The material speaking for itself, the way we like it. Look at the edge, where the sheet has been cut, and on selected pieces you'll see something else entirely: thin bands of vibrant colour running straight through, alternating with the natural layers underneath.
We call this technique Colour-Core, it's our own name for it, and one of the few genuinely distinctive things about how we build. If you've been searching for coloured edge plywood furniture, or wondering whether a plywood piece can have real, built-in colour rather than a painted finish, this is what that looks like.
It sums up something true about MODO more broadly: we're more than we look. Most of what we make is quiet on purpose, but quiet isn't the only register we work in, and Colour-Core is how we made room for the other one. It's built for the customers who love the natural, considered look but still want a flash of something bright and alive in the room — a way to bring real colour into a home without giving up the material honesty the rest of the range is built on.
What it actually is
Coloured edge plywood is plywood built with dyed veneer layers alongside natural ones, so colour appears at the cut edge rather than on the painted surface. It's a genuine construction technique, not a decorative coating — which is the whole reason it holds up better than paint or laminate over time. Plywood is made by gluing thin layers of wood veneer on top of each other, with the grain of each layer running at right angles to the one below it. That's what gives it its strength. Ordinary plywood uses natural veneer all the way through. Colour-Core swaps some of those layers for veneer that's been dyed before it's pressed into the sheet.
Most of our range uses birch-faced plywood as standard — it's stable, tight-grained, and takes the Colour-Core layers cleanly — though select pieces are also offered in oak veneer for a warmer, more open-grained finish. The result: the two faces of the board look like standard, natural plywood. But slice through it — cut a shelf edge, round a corner, chamfer a leg — and the colour is suddenly there, running in stripes through the full depth of the material, exactly the way the wood grain does. It's not a coating and it's not printed on. It's built into the material itself, layer by layer, before the piece even exists.
Why that matters more than it sounds like it should
Painted or laminated colour sits on furniture, it can chip, scratch through to a different colour underneath, or wear thin at the edges people actually touch. Colour-Core doesn't have that problem, because there's no "underneath" for it to wear through to. The colour is the material, all the way in. A knocked corner doesn't reveal bare wood; it reveals more of the same stripe.
It also means every visible cut edge becomes a design detail rather than something to hide. Most furniture tries to disguise the edge of a manufactured board — banding it, veneering over it, rounding it off so you don't look too closely. We do the opposite: the edge is where the material tells you what it actually is. It's a small, honest flourish that comes from the construction itself, not from a finishing step bolted on afterwards.
Meet the palette
Four colours, each one named for the mood it brings into a room, not just where it sits on a colour wheel:
- Indigo Blue — a deep, confident blue
- Crimson Red — a rich, saturated red
- Honey Yellow — the shade that started the whole idea
- Forest Green — a dark, grounded green
They're designed to sit alongside the natural range rather than replace it — one striped edge is enough to change the character of a piece without shouting.
Where you'll see it
We use Colour-Core selectively. As a line, a contrasting edge, a detail that shows itself when you get close rather than a piece that shouts its colour from across the room. It works especially well on pieces where an edge is naturally on display: shelf fronts, table edges, stool sides, the corners of a tray. The rest of the piece stays quiet; the colour does its work in the places your eye and your hand actually land.
A material choice, not just a look
This sits on top of the same logic behind everything else we make: plywood because it's stable, efficient, and built to last, and colour built into the layers because it's more durable than colour applied on top. It's a small technical decision that happens to also look good, which is usually the kind of decision worth building a range around.
If you want to see it in person rather than in a product photo, browse the current range — the edge detail photographs well, but it's genuinely better up close.