The weight problem.

The Beam Shop exists because of a house that could not carry its own ceiling. A major mountain remodel wanted the warmth of heavy timber overhead, and the structure had nothing left to give. Every shop that quoted the job quoted around the problem. The look was possible; the load was not.

The answer was to separate the two. What a room responds to in a timber ceiling is the surface: the grain, the shadows, the mass the eye reads. What the structure responds to is the weight. Build a beam as a real-timber skin around a hollow core and you keep the first while shedding most of the second.

What the numbers mean for a drawing

A solid timber of any size is a serious load, and on a long span it starts making demands: bigger framing above, blocking, sometimes steel. A hollow beam of the same face dimensions weighs a fraction as much, which means beam placement becomes a design decision instead of a structural negotiation. Ceilings that could never carry solid timber can carry the look of it.

There is a quieter benefit, too. The core is empty, and empty space in a finished ceiling is valuable real estate. Lighting runs, junctions, and steel connections disappear inside the beam instead of beside it.

When solid is still right

Mantels that take a chainsaw check. Posts that actually bear. Pieces the hand will rest on. We build and supply solid timber for all of it. The point is not that hollow is better; it is that the choice belongs in the drawing, where it can be made on purpose.

The hollow answer to the weight problem lives on our custom box beams page, section drawings included.