Where the wood comes from.

Every beam starts with a species decision, and it is the decision the rest of the room answers to. We build in four: cedar, white oak, Douglas fir, and poplar, real timber chosen board by board for the job it is headed to.

The four we build in

Cedar is the workhorse of the stained work: it takes color evenly, stays light on the structure, and it is the one species we finish in the shop, in eight standard stains. White oak is the calm one, tight and even, the grain designers reach for when the room is doing the talking. Douglas fir runs warm and straight, with the long, honeyed figure that reads right in mountain rooms. And poplar is the quiet professional, in two forms: green poplar for the paint-grade work, white poplar when it will take a stain. Ash and white pine are joining the bench as projects call for them, and white oak alone runs from plain and quarter sawn to thermally modified and hand hewn.

Character, when the room wants a past

Some rooms want timber that looks like it has been somewhere: hewing marks, weathered texture, color that did not come from a can. That is a surface decision as much as a species decision, and it is specified the same way, deliberately, in the amount the room calls for. We wrote about reading those surfaces in Reading character timber.

Why the finish follows the species

Cedar leaves our shop stained, in one of the eight standards. Everything else leaves unstained on purpose: the color gets set on site, by the finisher who can hold the board against the floor, the trim, and the actual light. That is not us doing less. It is the match happening in the only place a match can be judged.

See the species and the eight cedar finishes on our custom beams page.