Custom Bar Tops

Custom Bar Tops in Los Angeles

A bar top is the most-touched surface in any restaurant, hotel lobby, brewery tasting room, or home entertaining space. It takes spills, elbows, glassware, heat, and decades of wear, and it does it while serving as the visual centerpiece of the room. At House of Hardwood, we build custom wood bar tops for hospitality groups, contractors, designers, and homeowners across Los Angeles, milled from premium domestic and exotic hardwoods and finished to your spec.

We have been operating out of our Wellesley Avenue yard since 1947, and bar tops are one of the projects we build most often. Bring us a drawing, a sketch on a napkin, or a full set of architectural plans, and our team will walk you through species, construction, edge profile, finish, and lead time.

What We Build

Our custom bar top work covers the full range of formats:

• Straight-edge plank tops in single boards or matched glue-ups, sized to your bar layout
• Live-edge slab bar tops with natural waney edges left intact
• Waterfall bar tops with mitered returns down one or both ends
• Long restaurant service bars built in segmented sections to be joined on site
• Back bar shelving and bottle displays milled to match the front bar
• Floating residential bar tops engineered for hidden steel substructure
• Outdoor bar tops in ipe, teak, or other naturally rot-resistant species

Every top is milled to your finished dimensions, with sink cutouts, tap holes, drink rails, glass channels, and cable pass-throughs cut in shop where requested.

Species We Recommend for Bar Tops

The right species depends on the look you want, how the bar will be used, and whether the top will live indoors or outside. A few we keep moving through the shop:

• Walnut - The most-requested species for upscale interior bars. Rich chocolate heartwood, straight grain, takes oil finishes beautifully. Available in extra-wide and extra-long glue-up configurations.
• White Oak - Quartersawn or rift-sawn white oak is the workhorse of modern restaurant design. Hard, stable, takes stain evenly, and the tight grain reads clean in everything from Japanese-inspired interiors to American craftsman spaces.
• Sapele and Mahogany - For a classic English pub, hotel lobby, or speakeasy aesthetic. Deep reddish-brown tones, ribbon-stripe figure in sapele, and exceptional stability for long runs.
• Hard Maple - Bright, light, and tough. Common in coffee shops, breweries, and high-volume service bars where a clean modern look is the goal.
• Hickory - Bold grain and dramatic color contrast for rustic, lodge, or farmhouse builds.
• Live-Edge Slabs - Walnut, claro walnut, oak, sycamore, and other species in single-slab format. Each slab is one of a kind and selected by hand from our slab inventory.
• Ipe and Teak - Naturally oily and rot-resistant. The right call for poolside bars, rooftop service areas, patios, and any exterior installation that needs to weather Southern California sun and rain.

If you have a species in mind that we don’t have on the rack, we can usually source it. Lead times depend on what you’re after, and we will give you a realistic timeline up front.

Edge Profiles and Construction

Edge profile is one of the easiest ways to set the tone of a space. We mill the standard profiles in shop:

• Square edge with a hand-eased corner
• Roundover at 1/4″, 3/8″, or 1/2″ radius
• Bullnose
• Ogee and double-ogee
• Chamfered edge
• Live edge, sealed and stabilized
• Drink rail routed into the bartender side

For bars that exceed our single-board capacity, we build glue-ups with carefully matched grain and color. Joints are clamped under pressure and surfaced through our wide-belt sander for a seamless finished face. Single-slab tops are available up to the dimensions of the slabs in our current inventory, and we keep wide and long slabs with carefully matched grain in stock for exactly this kind of project.

Finishing Options

How you finish a bar top determines how well it holds up under daily service. We finish in shop or supply unfinished and ready for your finisher to handle. Common options:

• Conversion varnish for commercial-grade durability against alcohol, citrus, and heat
• Two-part epoxy pour for a high-gloss, fully sealed bar surface
• Hardwax oil for a low-sheen natural look that can be spot-repaired without full refinishing
• Polyurethane in satin, semi-gloss, or gloss
• Food-safe oil and wax for residential bars and butcher-style surfaces

For restaurant and bar installations, we generally recommend a hard catalyzed finish or epoxy. Oil finishes look beautiful but require ongoing maintenance and are not ideal for high-volume service environments where wet glasses sit in one spot for hours.

Sizing, Thickness, and Lead Times

Most bar tops are built in the 1-3/4″ to 2-1/2″ finished thickness range, with thicker slabs available when the design calls for visual weight. We can mill thinner for floating designs or thicker for chunky live-edge installations.

Lead times depend on species availability, finish complexity, and the cutouts and joinery involved. Simple straight-edge tops in stocked species can ship in one to two weeks. Long restaurant bars, custom glue-ups, and slab-matched runs typically take three to six weeks. Outdoor species and special-order material can extend the timeline. We give you an honest schedule up front so you can coordinate with your GC, designer, or installer.

Sustainability Options

For projects with green building requirements, LEED scorecards, or client sustainability standards, we carry FSC certified stock in select species and can source additional certified material to order. The certified lumber looks, machines, and performs exactly like our conventional stock, with the verified chain of custody documented for your project file.

Who We Build For

We work with restaurant ownership groups, hotel design firms, hospitality contractors, set decorators, architects, residential designers, and homeowners building out their own spaces. Our team can spec directly from architectural drawings or work from a rough sketch and a tape measure. We have built bar tops for fine dining rooms, brewery tasting rooms, hotel lobbies, country clubs, private residences, and film and television sets across Los Angeles.

We do not handle on-site installation, but we coordinate closely with your installer on dimensions, mounting details, expansion gaps, and finish handoff so the piece drops in without surprises.