When the pandemic sent us out of the office in 2020, we ended up doing a lot of our meetings outside, in Philomath. That was already the production side of the company, the old mill site we’d taken on, with another twenty-some acres added a couple years later, so there was plenty of room. Plenty of hill.
My partner Brad Mehl was always around, and he was always after me to walk the hill with him. He’d go on about the view. The silviculture. Mary’s Peak sitting right there. He’d keep saying it: this is the heart of Oregon forestry. I’d walk it with him and he wasn’t wrong.
About then our office lease in Portland was coming up. We were finishing a second seven year term, due to end in December of 2020. So you do the math a guy does standing on a hillside he already owns, looking at a rent check. For roughly a ten year payback, we could build our own office right there on site. Stop renting. Put the company where the wood was.
Leaving Portland was not a small thing. Patrick Lumber had been a Portland company for over a hundred years. You don’t walk away from an address like that on a whim. But we were already growing roots in Benton county, and roots are hard to argue with.
So 2021 was the year of planning and selling the idea and drawing it up. The shareholders came around quickly. Brad’s dad Buck helped us flag a path for the road to follow up to where our building was going to sit. Then the cat came on and scraped it in, gravel down, and we had our road. Once the trading group could drive up there and stand on it and see what Brad had been seeing, they came around too. Patrick Lumber was going to have a new home.
The design came off a barn. There’s a place a few miles west of our mill, an old barn the owners of Lumos Winery had fixed up with a wine tasting room and a deck off the side. It just resonated with us. Understated. Oversized timber frame. A barn that didn’t apologize for being a barn. We got Dave Clingman, an architect and a trader for Wood Source out of Colorado, and my son Nick, who’s a structural engineer with a keen eye for design, and the two of them designed the building off that feeling. We signed DC Builders to put it up. Those two deserve a lot of the credit for it ever happening.
I’ll tell you what’s in the walls, because the walls are what it’s all about.
Most of the structure is salvage. The timber frame came primarily from logs off the 2020 Oregon fire salvage. The big timbers came from Lynn Herbert. And the siding is reclaimed redwood bridge timber. The wood for the ceiling in Terminal B at Sacramento International Airport came from the Franklin-Thornton Bridge, an old wooden bridge that was built in 1937 and was subsequently damaged by floods in 1997. A company called McCool Millwork machined that run of redwood for the airport. This was the leftover. It had been sitting around a few years and I think they were just tired of looking at it, so we bought it.
Then we went to work on it. We ripped a six by six off each timber and flipped it to make vertical grain one by six for the battens. We resawed the rest into one by ten boards. So the whole building is wrapped in board and batten, a good wide six inch batten, every stick of it redwood that already had a long life in it before it got to us. The Franklin-Thornton Bridge, taken apart, run through a mill, and stood back up as the Timber Hall in Philomath, Oregon.
Inside it keeps going. Ulli Lau donated all the vertical grain Douglas fir for the door and window trim. The exterior decking is Alaska yellow cedar. There’s Oregon walnut in some of the furniture, and hemlock and tan oak and alder showing up here and there. Every board in that building is a species we know and have shipped and stood behind. It’s not decoration. It’s the inventory, sawn up and put where people can sit with it.
And the sugar pine table is in there. The one Mike Redmond built for us out of three inch slabs, the one it took six men to carry into the conference room. It is not leaving that building. I’ve written about that table already. It belongs here too.
There’s one more thing the building does just by standing there. It’s a carbon bank. Every stick of that salvaged redwood and fire-killed fir is holding its carbon for another century instead of burning up or rotting back into the air. That’s how mass timber works. Framing it in wood instead of steel and concrete has the embodied carbon effect with a twenty five to forty percent reduction in emissions.
So we leaned into it. We designed the Timber Hall to use about twice as much wood as it actually needed. The 12×12 beams that rise up from below the floor run twelve board feet to the linear foot. The 8x8s they replaced would have run five and a third. Same story overhead, where the 10×10 roof structure is way over-engineered, a lot more wood than the load calls for. We did that on purpose. More wood makes a room feel like a forest. The building that holds the most carbon happens to be the one that feels the most alive. We did it for the feel. The extra carbon lock is a bonus.
The building has a soul. I keep coming back to Frank Lloyd Wright when I try to say why. Organic architecture, he called it. Buildings sited to be looked at as one with the land instead of stuck on top of it. The Timber Hall already seems to grow into the hill rather than out of it. That was Brad’s hillside the whole time. We just finally built on it.
We finished construction and moved in the spring of 2023. Another rebirth for a company that started in 1915, and a chance to point it at the future instead of the past. The monthly trader meeting that we’d started outside during the pandemic, before there was any building at all, just kept going. Now it has a roof. A roof made out of a burned forest and an old California bridge, looking out at the heart of Oregon forestry.
Mr. Mehl’s hillside walks did that. Meetings have commenced. Transactions completed. Lumber traded.
Wood is good in a lot of ways. This is one of them.
