In this article I interrogate the complex relationship between nature and culture by examining how tropical nature and raw materials were conceptualized and displayed in the nineteenth century. I do so by discussing a display of tropical wood mounted by the Empire of Brazil for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. The reception of this display in Europe is analysed through Karl Max’s ideas on the gendering of nature and commodity exchange, through the concept of tropicality, and through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s binaries of the raw and the cooked, which help reveal how natural materials were commodified into things themselves. Broadly, I am interested in putting ‘nature in our official past’ and bringing key concerns from environmental history studies to the fore, to bear on studies in design history.