Lasting impressions
Photo/David A. Rodgers
John and Ann Sweet and their dogs wander the Sweet Timber Frame workshop in Mount Desert where massive beams are prepared for joinery
Photo/David A. Rodgers
The entrance of a home built by Sweet Timber Frames. The $405 million timber frame industry has grown about 25% since 2007.
John Sweet calls it a barn. That hardly seems the right word for it.
This “barn” has 10 dormers. Parking for four cars on the first floor. A master bedroom, a bath and two kids’ rooms on the second, exposed beams throughout and big windows that overlook Sullivan Harbor on the rocky Maine coast.
Sweet is at work on a matching house a few feet away, in Sorrento. It would be just another beautiful spread by the ocean except for one detail.
Both 36-by-60 frames were raised without a single nail.
Sweet’s a timber frame builder. He uses 8-inch square hemlock beams, precise wood pegs, mortise and tenon joints. And he’s busy. Like a lot of the 40-plus timber frame homes he’s built around Mount Desert Island, this $2.7 million project is for a client in Connecticut who vacations up here.
It’s a niche with a premium — timber frame homes can easily double the cost of traditional construction — and yet a market that’s been growing. The national Timber Frame Business Council estimates about 1% of all new homes going up are timber frame construction, and Maine ranks in the top 10 states where they are located. Timber frame housing is an estimated $405 million a year industry, according to the timber trade council, up 25% from 2007.
“It’s been a viable building method for over 1,000 years. Only in the last 100 years have people changed away from that design of construction — they’re turning back,” says Sweet, owner of Sweet Timber Frames in Mount Desert.
It doesn’t hurt, he adds, that “it’s a good place to put your money. [A timber frame house] is not going to disappear on you.”
‘A house with soul’
John Connolly, who owns Connolly & Co. of Edgecomb, was an early member of the National Timber Framers Guild of North America. He built his first home for a fisherman in New Harbor around 1980. Twelve years ago he spun off Maine Barn Co. to build timber frame barns.
“Back in the beginning we did a lot of education with the customer,” Connolly says. “They kept saying we’re log builders. We’d say, ‘No, we’re different.’”
A quick primer from the trade council: log homes are built with round logs stacked horizontally; post and beam construction uses logs or square timber held together with metal brackets; timber frames use wood joints and wood pegs, no metal, not even nails.
For buyers, the attraction lies in a mix of aesthetics — beams are almost always left exposed inside — a desire for big open interiors, energy efficiency and green engineering.
It’s often not so much a house as a statement.
Ben Tipton, and his wife, Michelle Larocque-Tipton, had a 1,000-square-foot timber frame home built in Woolwich last year, purposely half the size of their former home in Vermont.
“The world lives in a much smaller footprint than the typical American does,” Tipton says. “It’s not fair to take more than we should.”
The result? A project that cost about $240,000 with the home and land improvements, built as eco-consciously as possible. Wood siding instead of vinyl, no dishwasher or dryer. Tipton describes the look as “elegant, but simple,” and spacious enough for the couple and their two young children. Heat and electricity cost $1 a day, which includes a pool pump in the summer.
“It’s given me more time to enjoy other things,” Tipton says of his home. “It’s basically maintenance-free and sturdy for the next 200 years.”
After a rebirth in the 1970s, timber frame homes started appearing primarily as vacation homes around the country, says Pam Hinton, TFBC executive director. In her group’s last survey, nearly 38% of buyers were between ages 41 and 50, 35% between 51 and 60.
Gaius Hennin, president of the Shelter Institute in Woolwich, which offers home-building classes and sells timber frames under a spin-off company, says he’s seeing customers of all ages. About half his customers want a primary residence and half a vacation home.
“One thing that does tie them all together, they’re looking for a house that’s not going to be a run-of-the-mill McMansion,” Hennin says. “They want a house with soul.”
The spin-off, Hennin Post & Beam, was building five to six timber frame homes a year in the 1980s. Today, it’s often between 18 and 24.
Though he warns there’s any number of theories, Hennin, a second-generation timber framer, thinks timber frame’s popularity today is, in part, a backlash to the current put-’em-up-quick housing mentality.
“The industry has been trending toward slightly less craftsmanship of work,” Hennin says. “Timber framing is very real. It involves skilled craftsmen working by hand to get to a finished product.”
Of course, that time takes money.
“A timber frame home is a little bit like artwork,” he says. “Someone may look at a painting for $50,000 and not begin to understand why it sells for that much. The price range (compared to) a stick building can be huge — two, three, five times more than a stick building.”
With careful design, it’s possible to keep that difference to 25%, Hennin says.
‘Kick-back atmosphere’
Timber frame homes are commonly insulated with SIPs — structural insulated panels — made of up two oriented strand boards with a solid foam core in between. In traditional stick construction, Hennin says, 2-by-4s touch both inside Sheetrock and outside siding, providing a narrow channel for heat to escape. SIPs wrap around the entire exterior like a shell, enclosing all the wood inside, he says, which keeps in that heat and cuts down on drafts.
In his frame home, built by Hennin, Tipton used 6-inch foam in the walls and 8-inch foam in the roof. He heats with a combination of electric, wood and solar. The house itself is 20 feet by 30 feet, two stories. He keeps a blog about living happy and thrifty at www.simplelivinginmaine.blogspot.com. And he’s encouraged by the interest in timber frames.
“I probably have one or two people a month call me and come see the home,” Tipton says. “It’s pretty to look at. It just sends out this warm, welcoming, this-is-a-place-you-can-kick-back atmosphere.”
Timber frames use 10 to 15% less wood than a similar stick-built home, though they do need larger trees, Hennin says.
Resale information on them is largely anecdotal. When Tipton sold his too-large timber frame in Vermont before moving to Maine, it held its value well, he says.
There’s room for growth in the timber frame housing market, Hinton says, largely because it takes up so little of the market now. In the trade council’s national survey this year, more than half the respondents predicted less business, due to the sluggishness of construction overall.
Connolly, who builds eight to 10 timber frame homes a year, has a house going up soon on West Port Island and barn going up soon outside Damariscotta. (Barns, he adds, rarely hold animals. Think antique car collections, meditation centers.)
“We’re bidding on a very big barn project now in Maryland,” he says. “It’s still been very slow, we’re doing a lot more estimating as the economy starts to come back.”
Sweet and wife Ann offer their own timber frame salt box as a model to prospective customers and promote the use of all-Maine wood in their construction. Hemlock comes from Parker Lumber in Bradford, so straight and square it doesn’t need to be planed, they say.
“Inquires have increased,” Ann Sweet says. “We’ve had some people say that they’d build when their other home sold.”
John Sweet says one of his timber frame homes can take a year to 14 months to build. He hopes to complete the Sorrento house, with its basement, porches and cupola, a year from now.
“I think this is maybe a niche market, or maybe I’m very lucky,” he says.
Kathryn Skelton, a writer based in Litchfield, can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.
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