(Above right: Emily Mace photo of England's most famous post and beam structure is a hotlink to her website about that wonderfully spooky place. The unbroken Stonehenge is in the Columbia River Gorge.  It was built bySam Hill.)

This classic building method glamorizes Oregon’s timber resources.  It utilizes large vertical timbers (posts) and horizontal wooden beams joined with mortise (slot) and tenon joints and held together classically by wooden pegs.  The structure is built around this skeleton, leaving the beams exposed inside for what today’s promoters of the system term “a natural beauty statement.”

Timberpeg, a company founded in New Hampshire in 1973, has prospered 
as it introduces this new/old building concept across the nation.  Oregon has become a focus of  the Timberpeg effort.  Three years ago the company established a high tech, computer-operated mill in the virtual timber ghost town of Idanha, on Highway 22, just below Santiam Pass.  Here, Douglas Fir is transformed into dimensionally precisioned posts and beams.  Early this year, Timberpeg opened its first Oregon sales office in Bend, undoubtedly inspired by the explosion of upscale new construction that has centered on Deschutes county in recent years.

Native materials rule

Central Oregon resort and residential development celebrates the use of  natural building resources close at hand.  Architectural design hereabouts features liberal use of timbers, logs and stone.  Timberpeg designs specify Douglas Fir structural members, hand-split Red Cedar shakes and Cedar siding.  Designer Randy Kaatz of Bend operates Classic Timber Designs as an independent Timberpegs representative.  He teams with architects and builders to create custom homes based upon Timberpegs’ extensive home plans portfolio. 

“Timberpeg provides rustic designs ideal for mountain and forest settings,” Kaatz says, “and the plans are well suited to snowy or rainy environments…the look is …timeless…”  He points out that post and beam designs are very flexible, with interior spaces easily and economically adapted to an owner’s desires.  An original American colonist dropped into today’s Deschutes county could verify the adage that “what’s old is new again.”

This piece was assembled from both commercial and non-commercial sources. We are betting that most of you didn't previously know which one was the "tenon."