Turning House Furniture To Show Furniture Made of Documented Reclaimed Wood At Spring High Point Show

Furniture World Magazine

A couple of years ago Spencer Morten III heard about a preservationist who was interested in salvaging bricks and wood from an abandoned plant to use for building restorations in Europe. Just weeks later, he found himself in England admiring furniture made from reclaimed wood. The seed of an idea took root. Morten began to investigate. Amid a growing public sensitivity to protecting the environment and recycling, the green movement was emerging in various forms throughout the home furnishings industry. He took note that a few furniture companies were dabbling with the idea of using reclaimed wood. Armed with a fresh view of the past, Morten looked at abandoned 70- to 150-year-old structures with no historical value and destined for landfills as an untapped source for rare – if not extinct – old growth lumber. He marveled at the thought of furniture featuring heavily aged woods like black walnut, wormy chestnut, southern long leaf pine or fiddleback maple, to name just a few. He envisioned beautiful solid wood furniture, accessories, flooring and home fixtures with the distinct character, integrity and spirit of vintage woods transformed into a new showcase of products. “Old buildings suddenly took on new life,” says Morten, CEO and chairman of Turning House Furniture and Turning House Millworks. “This became my passion: to not only celebrate the character of vintage woods preserved in a multiplicity of new wood products but to launch a zero waste reclamation company.” Named as a tribute to the ancient craft of solid woodturning, Turning House Millworks was launched at the former Corriher Mill in Landis, N.C., in early September. Sister company, Turning House Furniture, is set to debut at the April 2009 High Point Market. As a vertical supply chain, the Millworks will provide the wood that makes the furniture products so special. “At both Turning House companies, we seek to be good stewards of the Earth,” Morten says. “We are resurrecting forgotten and abandoned buildings in the form of beautifully made furniture and reviving the stories of these once proud buildings and companies.” Turning House Millworks According to Turning House Millworks Partner Terry Miller, an expert de-constructionist and general contractor, “Buildings are tediously deconstructed in reverse order. From the start of the permitting process, disassembly can take up to five years. All woods are historically researched and authenticated in batches segmented by the building of origin.” In addition, as a member of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), Turning House Millworks offers documentation for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) tax credits on all reclaimed lumber products. To date, about 15 species have been reclaimed, totaling more than one million board feet in inventory, ready to mill on site according to customer specifications. (See companion release, Painstaking Deconstruction Process by Turning House Millworks: A 98% Building Reclamation.) Turning House Furniture Unlike “new” furniture, Turning House furniture is authentic, each piece with a documented history of the source of the lumber supplied by Turning House Millworks. A member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council and, it will make its debut in both a new 6,000-sq.-ft. permanent showroom in IHFC Green 1A, along with a space in Interhall 101, the three portfolios include approximately 100 pieces created by industry veterans Caroline Hipple and Dixon Bartlett of HB2. But while the wood is aged, the designs take a dramatic departure from their origins, always showcasing the character of the wood. “What we can tell you is that the furniture will be presented in three distinct portfolios for every room of the home,” Morten says. “Their fresh functional designs are transformed into truly one-of-a-kind pieces when made of beautifully aged timbers and each will have a story to tell for generations to come.” About The Deconstruction Process: There’s a whole lot more to taking down a building than meets the eye, especially when the goal is total reclamation. The process can take up to five years with no guarantee of what lies within. For Turning House Millworks, the gold is in the wood – rare and extinct old growth lumber that was used to build factories and mills 75 to 150 years ago, often during the Industrial Revolution before steel became a primary building material. Beautiful hardwoods – black walnut, wormy chestnut, black gum, white oak, red oak, southern long leaf pine, fiddleback maple, curly maple, straight grain maple and more – were routinely used for general construction. They were indigenous, plentiful and therefore, cheap. “When buildings with no historic value reach the end of their life cycle, they are typically demolished and the waste is hauled to landfills,” says Spencer Morten III, CEO and chairman of Turning House Millworks and sister company, Turning House Furniture. “We look at these buildings and see materials that are not only useful but sometimes more valuable than when the building was originally constructed. In the case of the old wooden beams, flooring, and ceiling panels, we see a second life by repurposing it as one-of-a-kind furniture, accessories and products like flooring.” That puts Turning House Millworks in a class of its own. “It takes a special kind of patience, attention to detail and skill to see the beauty in the hundreds of abandoned old factories that dot the Southern landscape,” says Terry Miller, a Turning House Millworks partner and general contractor who specializes in deconstruction. “We have been able to master the de-nailing and re-sawing processes, thereby recycling 98 percent of each building we deconstruct. It is our ultimate passion to reuse every single material we discover in a building.” Not only has Turning House Millworks won the support of preservationists who come to them for old wood and materials to use for restoration projects, but city managers, private property owners and builders have already begun to contact them about buildings slated for demolition. Instead of filling up the landfills at a high cost, the building materials are recycled, the land is graded and it, too, can be restored as a viable property. One of the first buildings under deconstruction is the Corriher Mill in Landis, N.C., which opened in 1913, closed in the mid-90s and has been vacant ever since. With 235,000 square feet of flooring, equaling more than four football fields, Corriher Mill will yield approximately one million board feet of lumber, enough to floor more than 650 average homes. That translates into saving approximately 19,000 trees on 47 acres of land. (The average full-grown tree measures 10 inches in diameter and stands 25 feet tall. One acre can produce 400 trees.) Other deconstruction properties include the Rip Van Winkle Distillery Warehouse (1935) in Lawrenceburg, Ky.; a tobacco warehouse in Greeneville, Tenn. (1909); and a yarn mill in Bessemer City, N.C. (1890), with others under negotiation. Deconstruction: A Step-by-Step Process First, the team analyzes the materials and identifies possible contamination or damaged areas before applying for the required special permits. The structure is then un-built in reverse order in sections by a crew trained to preserve the wood and other materials for reuse, starting with the ceiling, then the posts and beams, and finally the flooring and foundations. The harvest can yield not only the expected vintage woods and bricks but copper and even marble used for the foundations. As the wood is extracted, the timber goes through a multi-step milling process using tools created by Turning House craftsmen and special machinery designed for their specific purposes. The wood is measured, counted and separated by species for authentication. Each piece is checked for metal using a special metal detector, and all nails, bolts, screws and other embedded metal are tediously removed by hand. Next, the timbers are then prepared, using a number of saws and planers, including a proprietary Turning House Millworks beam saw, which at 44 feet long is the longest known indoor saw in the U.S. Ultimately, the wood is cut into conventional lumber dimensions, graded for quality and stacked based on length and grade. Finally, the wood is heated in a dry kiln to 150 degrees Fahrenheit for six days to kill bugs, molds or mildew, and to ensure uniform moisture content. A Custom Operation Turning House Millworks is a totally custom resource for reclaimed lumber. “Already the word is spreading among architects, engineers, home builders and general contractors looking for green products made to their specifications,” Miller says. “Not only are we developing an amazing inventory of about 15 species of rare woods, but we also have the ability to provide wood for cabinetry, construction beams and other woodwork that requires an unusual size, length, width and thickness.” “It’s heartwarming to know that we’ve rescued these beautiful woods and other building materials from the landfills,” Morten says. “As a fourth generation furniture maker, it’s rewarding to uncover rare species of wood that we never thought would be manufactured again, and that’s priceless.”