A solid end-grain Maple personalised chopping board with handles. End-grain construction is the most hygienic choice and the kindest finish for your knives — softer than bamboo, tighter-grained than oak.
You can add up to three lines of text to your chopping board, maximum 23 characters each — type it straight onto the board below and it travels with your order.
Type straight onto the board. Up to 3 lines, 23 characters each. 0 of 3 lines
Made to order · dispatched in 10 days · secure checkout
| Wood | Maple Wood, end-grain construction |
|---|---|
| Inlay | American Walnut |
| Dimensions | 43 × 33 × 4 cm (16.9 × 13 × 1.6 in) |
| Weight | 4.2 kg (9.3 lbs) |
| Features | Integrated handles |
| Finish | Food-safe mineral oil |
| Origin | Made in the United Kingdom |
| EAN / GTIN-13 | 5056722006962 |
End-grain boards expose the cut ends of the wood fibres so that knife edges slip between them rather than slicing across them. The result: blades stay sharper for longer, and the surface self-heals over time. The alternative, side-grain, is much simpler (and cheaper) to produce, but has a few disadvantages. The key issue with side-grain is that as you cut away wood fibres, the holes and cuts may keep moisture and bacteria, resulting in a less hygienic surface. This is avoided with end-grain, there is a reason why butchers blocks are made with end-grain wood.
Hard Maple sits in the sweet spot — dense enough to resist scoring, soft enough to be kind to steel, and tight-grained enough to stay hygienic. Unlike bamboo it won’t dull your knives, and unlike oak it doesn’t trap moisture which can keep bacteria alive in your chopping board. American walnut is another wood that occupies the Goldilocks zone of not too hard, not too soft. In addition, the light colour of the maple and the dark colour of the walnut creates a great contrast for personalised wooden chopping boards.
Rinse under warm water and wipe dry after use. Never put your board in the dishwasher or leave it submerged. When the surface looks dry, refresh with a coat of oil — once a month for the first six months, then a few times a year. With this care, your board will outlive most of your kitchen.
Free delivery across the UK. As each board is made to order, dispatch is approximately 10 days from purchase. Boards that are not personalised can be returned the first 14 days if unused. Personalised wooden boards are only returned if we made a mistake. However, we want you to be happy with your board, so feel free to contact us if you are not 100 percent satisfied. We use Shopify to take payments securely, and you can use Google Pay, Apple Pay, Visa, Mastercard, Klarna and American Express.
At 43 × 33 cm, a personalised chopping board this size earns its place on the worktop by doing more than chopping. The same end-grain maple that protects your knives makes a handsome serving board, and the walnut lettering turns a cheese course or a grazing platter into the centrepiece of the table. Chopping board, carving board, cheese board and charcuterie board: one piece of timber, four jobs.
Daily prep on a 4 cm end-grain surface that stays flat, keeps knives sharp and closes over its own knife marks. Rinse, dry, done.
At 4.2 kg it stays put under a Sunday roast, and the integrated handles carry it from oven to table. The end grain takes the carving knife without scarring.
Maple’s pale, close grain sets off a wedge of Stilton or a whole Camembert, and the inlaid names make it a personalised cheese board for the couple doing the hosting.
Big enough for a charcuterie board or grazing platter for six: salami, coppa, bresaola, bread and olives. Wipe it down afterwards and it is a chopping board again.
Most chopping boards are an afterthought — disposable plastic, cheap glue, a year of life if you’re lucky. We make something different. Cloumann boards are built from end-grain hard maple wood, joined without shortcuts, and finished by hand. It’s the board I wanted in my own kitchen and couldn’t find.
Adding a bespoke walnut inlay turns it into something else entirely: a piece of furniture for the kitchen, a wedding gift that won’t be forgotten, a milestone you can chop a Sunday roast on for the next thirty years. I hope you agree, and that you will let us design your perfect chopping board.
Lars B. Andersen · Founder, Cloumann
Putting a name on a chopping board means committing it to the surface you cut on. How that mark is made decides two things: whether it is still legible in twenty years, and how easy the board is to keep clean in the meantime. There are three established methods, and they are not equivalent.
Every personalised Cloumann board is inlaid in solid American walnut. If you searched for an engraved chopping board, this is the engraving that lasts. Here is the reasoning, alongside the two alternatives you will find elsewhere.
The lettering is routed out of the maple, the same shapes are cut from solid American walnut, and the two are glued together and sanded back flush. The mark is several millimetres of real timber rather than a coating, so the working face stays flat and continuous, and the contrast comes from the wood itself — it cannot fade, peel or wash out. It also survives re-sanding, which matters on a board you will enjoy for a lifetime.
A router or CNC bit cuts the design into the board, leaving it recessed roughly one to three millimetres below the surface. It is crisp, it holds fine line work, and it lasts as long as the depth does. The drawback is structural: the grooves sit in the working face, where food and water collect and take noticeably longer to dry out. Left unfilled the mark reads only as shadow; filled with resin or paint, it can chip.
A focused beam scorches the top layer of fibre, typically less than half a millimetre deep. It is the fastest and cheapest of the three and the only one that can reproduce a photograph or hairline type. But the mark is charred wood sitting on the cutting surface: it lightens more with each washing and oiling, burns unevenly across end grain because the fibre density varies, and disappears entirely the first time the board is sanded.
| Wood inlay what we use |
Engraving cut into surface |
Laser etching surface burn |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| How the mark is made | Solid walnut cut to shape and set into a routed recess | Design cut into the board with a bit | Top fibres scorched by a focused beam |
| Depth of the mark | 7-10 mm of solid wood | Roughly 1–3 mm recess | Usually under 0.5 mm of char |
| Surface when finished | Sanded flush — flat and continuous | Rough, recessed below the working face | Flat, but the fibres are burnt |
| Food & moisture | Nothing for debris or water to sit in | Grooves collect debris and bacteria and dry slowly | No recess, but porous char on the cutting face |
| Survives re-sanding | Yes — the walnut runs deep | Only until the recess is sanded out | No — removed by the first refresh |
| Colour over time | Natural walnut against maple; cannot fade | Shadow only, unless filled | Lightens with washing and oiling |
| Detail it can hold | Names, dates, logos and clean shapes | Fine lettering and line work | Photographs and hairline type |
| Relative cost | Highest | Moderate | Lowest |
The trade-off: inlay is the slowest and most expensive of the three, and it cannot hold hairline detail or reproduce a photograph — anything inlaid has to be a shape that can be cut and fitted in solid timber. For three lines of names and dates on a board meant to last decades, we think that is the right compromise.
A bespoke chopping board is not a present that gets used once and put away. Engraved with a name, a date or a few words that mean something, it travels from the wrapping paper to the worktop and stays there — chopped on, carved over and quietly admired for decades. That is why so many of the boards leaving our workshop are bought for someone else.
Every board takes up to three lines of engraving, twenty-three characters each — enough for two names and a date, or one line worth reading every morning.
Engrave a couple’s new shared surname, their wedding date, or the words they said to each other. Wood is the traditional fifth-anniversary gift, and personalised chopping boards make that symbolism something you can hold. A significant birthday might be yet another reason for gifts.
Names, dates & vowsThe old custom was to bring bread and salt so the house would never go hungry. The modern version carries the house number or the family name and sits on the counter before the boxes are unpacked. Maple’s pale, close grain lifts a dark kitchen and makes a small one feel larger.
House numbers & family namesA personalised butchers block engraved with years of service, a class year, or “The Boos Family Christmas” turns a collection from the office into a keepsake. It has weight and presence under the tree, and it is still in the kitchen long after most other christmas gifts have been recycled.
Milestones worth marking
