small shop, meticulous craft. calibrated for sanctuary at home
At birdloft, we create sustainable modern designs from wood, steel and air.
The wood is almost exclusively reclaimed old growth fir, salvaged from deconstructed barns and warehouses in Seattle, Tacoma and the Puget Sound environs. The wood is from the same ancient Pacific Northwest forest that provided industrial-scaled building material for the rest of the country from the 1850s to the 1990s. For the most part, the old growth forest is gone (although some awe-inspiring remnants can be found in parks and preserves) and is irreplaceable in today's lumber economy of roughly forty-year cycles, so we have to make as best use we can of what we have. And really, there is nothing like old-growth wood. Nothing comes close to it for its depth of tone and patina, its heft, its grain and warmth.
The sourced steel, for its part, is estimated at 89.5 percent recycled content, about three times the recycled content as much of the steel commercially available in this country.
And the part about the air - every piece of birdloft furniture is meant to breathe, to compose a small amount of space in a given room, help create sanctuary at home.
So our job - in our craft and sullen Pacific Northwest art - is mostly to reveal what's already there, to bring some clarity and breadth to the narrative in the wood - what an architect might term a minimal intervention. It's mostly about not doing too much, working with the wood to create a maximum content palimpsest.
In this work, we're calling on our experience working for studio furniture masters, architects who have seen too much and designers far hipper than us. We're also calling on our own work as architectural designers and builders. Jeff, for his part, is calling on his days at sea, lobstering - tenth generation Mainer - when words were luxuries rarely used, wood was about trapping crustaceans and the snow never landed, just turned the salt water into brushed metal. (Adrienne, will be adding her part here soon!)
Often, we carefully break the rules we were taught and faithfully learned.
And just to say, at birdloft, we do everything we can to work in an environmentally sustainable way. From initial salvage operations (proudly carried out in Yellow Truck, the biodiesel miser at 40mpg) to packing and shipping (reusing heavy duty recycled cardboard and pallet material for crating), to the wind powering our website, the goal is minimum consumption of new material and maximum reuse.
Let us design something for your home landscape. We'll keep it light. Make it beautiful.
