Whole Tree Homes
“What good is a home if you don’t have a decent planet to put it on?” – Henry David Thoreau

The Whole Tree Model: Gardening the Forest

Whole Tree Building uses thinnings from small diameter trees and sculpts them into timber frame buildings. Unlike conventional lumber processing, invasive, wind damaged or diseased trees, are used extensively with Whole Tree Building. This process creates a sustainable building model that increases the health of forests and provides a stronger framework for a home. Quality, conventional lumber requires sufficiently straight, mature trees. Today, with few old growth forests, the diameter and age of milled trees have steadily declined. Thinning a forest and harvesting trees for whole tree building preserves the older,weather-wise elders and their time tested genes so vital to the biodiversity of forests to come.

Strength As with food , when wood is processed it loses most of its strength. Whole trees, or Round Wood, is 50% stronger than an equal square section of lumber. Atree’s strength is derived from tubes of fibers in tension, resisting the shear forces of wind. Cutting these tubes (growth rings) to make lumber removes the strongest fibers, violating its concentric symmetry and causing lumber to twist. This is why the strength of any timber cut from any log will be less than a third the strength of the log. Whole Trees have weight-to-strength ratios comparable to steel in compression and twice that of steel in tension. Durability Whole Tree structures are the longest lasting wooden structures, often enduring hundreds of years, with some structures lasting over a thousand years. In contrast, milled wood, with its increased surface area, exposes end grains that wick moisture, encouraging rot. Milled wood also has more surface area which increases wood’s flammability. View a 360-degree panorama of a recent example of Whole Tree construction: the interior of the Chrysalis Farm House shortly after it was "closed in." (3.6 Mb, QuickTime required)

Design There is something timeless, deeply familiar and comforting about Whole Tree structures. They are at once ancient and avant guard. Unlike conventional building materials, machined to fit rigid dimensional modules, whole trees are sculpturally fluid and elastically supple. Trees love curves and will produce curved structures inexpensively; machines love straight lines and will do curves only at great cost. Whole Trees free design from the machine’s box as well as the machine’s dependence on the global marketplace. When we harvest you a home, we will utilize the resources of your land and your community, not global construction global construction commodities.