Antique French Oak

 

French vintners coined the term terroir to describe the earthy mix of climate, soil, and weather conditions that make wine taste the way it does. There’s no equivalent word to describe lumber, but the concept of terroir applies: every piece of wood on earth originally came from a tree, and that tree grew on a unique patch of soil in its particular corner of the world. The wind, weather, soil and sun make it what it is. That’s why this collection of Antique French Oak is so special, and couldn’t be replicated in any other place.

 
 

Sourced last autumn, this wood was salvaged from floorboards in farmhouses east of Paris in the French towns of Metz, Nancy, Dijon, as well as Lorraine and Bougogne in the region of Est. Dating from the 17th and 18th centuries, thesehouses were sturdily built and well loved. You wouldn’t find the kind of high-polish case furniture favored by the various Louis here; instead you’d be enchanted by the rustic simplicity and unspoiled beauty of the architecture and the surrounding countryside. Picture charmingly idiosyncratic paint colors, pictures and lighting fixtures just slightly askew, clean and fresh-smelling tea towels, and the promise of fresh bread each morning. So much history and daily life unfolded in these houses, and some pieces of it are coming to America.

 
 
 

History & Handcrafting on Crosby Street

 
 

Underneath a bank of skylights in her Crosby Street loft, with all her tools arrayed on a butcher block work table, artist Jill Platner makes her signature feather-like metal jewelry by hand. She’s developed a method for joining pieces of metal so that it drapes like fabric, and she has an acute feel for the material and knowledge of the tools of her trade. And she does all this inside a Federal style house in NoHo that practically radiates American history. Originally built in 1823 as a townhouse for James Roosevelt, an ancestor of FDR, in the 1850s the building housed a hospital run by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to earn a medical degree. With her sister Emily, also a physician (the sisters were the first and third women in America to earn medical degrees, respectively) Blackwell rented the building in 1857 and made it the home of the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. With the help of wealthy benefactors, many of them Quaker, the Blackwells ran the first hospital in America that was staffed entirely by women. 

 
The hospital ran by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell that occupied the Crosby Street building in the 1850s.

The hospital ran by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell that occupied the Crosby Street building in the 1850s.

 

Platner is fascinated by the building’s past, and her painstaking work renovating the building has revealed tantalizing pieces of its history. When she first toured it as a young designer in need of studio space in the 1990s, she noticed details like the chisel marks on the wooden beams—clearly the handiwork of a skilled craftsman—and recognized something of a kindred spirit. Platner made the light-filled top floor her studio, then expanded into the adjacent carriage house which is where she fabricates jewelry and makes large-scale metal sculptures.

 
The original flooring before being salvaged and milled by The Hudson Company.

The original flooring before being salvaged and milled by The Hudson Company.

 

In 2007 when she was preparing to buy her space, Platner discovered the story of the Blackwell sisters. Her top-floor studio was once the dormitory for the physicians and interns, while the lower floors were devoted to the maternity and illness wards, the pharmacy, and the waiting area. By 2012, when Platner became a part owner of the building, it was badly in need of repairs. There were bulging bricks and the roof was in dire straits. But she was committed to keeping intact as much of the building’s original material as she could, and that’s where The Hudson Company came in. Underneath some particle board, she discovered ten-inch wide boards that were original to the house. Well worn and quite uneven, Platner arranged to send the salvaged boards up to Pine Plains where they were milled and finished, then reinstalled. Now even and uniform, but still full of history and character, the floors are back where they belong on Crosby Street. “It looks incredible,” Platner says. “You can feel history in it.”

 
Jill Platner’s Studio. Photo credit: Aundre Larrow for The New York Times.

Jill Platner’s Studio. Photo credit: Aundre Larrow for The New York Times.

 

Inspiration in Imperfection: Reclaimed Wood and JB Blunk's Handcrafted Legacy

 
JB Blunk’s home on the Inverness Ridge with Redwood Enry Arch, 1976. Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

JB Blunk’s home on the Inverness Ridge with Redwood Enry Arch, 1976. Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

 

J.B. Blunk’s art career was probably inevitable one form or another, but it was a chance encounter with Isamu Noguchi in a Tokyo craft shop that put him on course to become one of the most innovative American craftsmen of the 20th century. It was the early 1950s, and Blunk—then a soldier in the US Army, stationed in Korea—was browsing at the craft shop when he met Noguchi who was there with his wife. Yamaguchi Yoshiko. Prior to his tour in Korea, Blunk had been a student at UCLA where he became fascinated by ceramics, and Noguchi decided to introduce him to the Japanese artistic polymath Kitaoji Rosanjin, who made exquisite, rustic and colorful pottery inspired by historical Japanese ceramics, as well as lacquerware and calligraphy. Blunk apprenticed himself to Rosanjin, became a skilled potter in his own right, and later worked for artist Toyo Kaneshige, a Living National Treasure. Returning to California in 1954, he was now energized and inspired to embark on a life in which craft shaped every corner of his life. Blunk’s name isn’t synonymous with midcentury style, and he’s not a household name. (Yet.) But with exhibitions in major galleries, including Kasmin and Blum & Poe, introducing his work to new audiences, his legacy seems to be getting the second look it deserves.

 
J.B. Blunk in his studio, c.1968. Courtesy: J.B. Blunk Collection

J.B. Blunk in his studio, c.1968. Courtesy: J.B. Blunk Collection

Interior of JB Blunk’s home with river stones and artworks by Blunk. Untitled painting, c.1990, and Redwood stool, c.1965.  Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

Interior of JB Blunk’s home with river stones and artworks by Blunk. Untitled painting, c.1990, and Redwood stool, c.1965.
Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

 

J.B. Blunk (1926–2002) was born in Ottawa, Kansas, and studied physics before switching to ceramics in college. Like Wharton Esherick, Blunk was an artist who didn’t make much of a distinction between home and studio. And like George Nakashima, he found much inspiration in the natural structure of wood—its knots, grain, colors, and textures. Blunk settled in the town of Inverness in the mid-1950s, and decided to build a cabin there himself. Now known as the Blunk House, the home was described in T Magazine as “a cottage from a midcentury-modern fairytale.” There’s a potter’s studio with three kilns, and a woodshop. Maria Nielson, Blunk’s daughter, and the author of a book on Blunk’s work, spends time at the house, where her father made everything from the sleeping loft to the ceramics in the kitchen by hand.

Woven into the fabric of the landscape and the house itself is redwood. The table in Blunk’s kitchen is crafted from a gigantic slab of redwood, and they dot the mountainous landscape of Inverness as far as the eye can see. Blunk was active in a variety of media, including clay and cast bronze, but his primary medium was wood. Sometimes a chainsaw was part of the picture. Blunk’s favored wood species was redwood, though he occasionally used cypress. Redwood’s characteristic color and natural softness gives it working properties that are almost clay-like. Blunk would salvage chunks of redwood on the landscape that had been discarded by loggers, and make use of his findings in the ways that best suited their scale. Using his chainsaw, he’d carve chairs out of single pieces of wood, sometimes creating “seating sculptures” that seemed to hover somewhere between sculpture and furniture. According to Mariah Nielson, even the bathroom sink in the Blunk House bears chisel marks.

 
Interior of JB Blunk’s home with artworks by Blunk, sofa by Max Frommeld, and cushions by Christine Nielson and Nancy Waite Harlow.  Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

Interior of JB Blunk’s home with artworks by Blunk, sofa by Max Frommeld, and cushions by Christine Nielson and Nancy Waite Harlow.
Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

 

From his time studying ceramics in Japan, Blunk was steeped in the aesthetic and philosophical principle of wabi sabi, which is difficult to translate precisely, but in an artistic context means accepting transience and imperfection, finding beauty in it, and not trying to “fix” anything about an object. Wabi sabi had a powerful influence on both historical Japanese crafts and on mingei, the Japanese craft revival movement that emerged there in response to industrialization in the 1930s, and was several decades underway when Blunk visited Tokyo.

A wabi sabi approach to craft could mean embracing asymmetry, or a nick or a scratch, or a perceived flaw in a piece of wood—like a discarded burl of no interest to commercial loggers. Blunk took the lesson of his craft training and applied it to working with reclaimed wood. Natural “flaws” became centerpieces, and odd shapes were just another form of inspiration. A major work entitled “The Planet,” completed in 1969, can be viewed at the Oakland Museum of California. It’s made from a single, the enormous root structure of a redwood—the only remains of a long-dead tree. It was typical of Blunk to salvage something that others had overlooked, and to create from it something unique, odd, and beautiful, that seemed at once ancient and modern. Perfection isn’t easy. But imperfection, at its best, is even harder to achieve. It seems safe to say that J.B. Blunk nailed it.

 
Wishbone, 1977. Sculpted Redwood, 110h x 54w x 35d in.  Image via Jason Jacques Gallery.

Wishbone, 1977. Sculpted Redwood, 110h x 54w x 35d in.
Image via Jason Jacques Gallery.

 

The West Village Townhouse

 
 

At The Hudson Company we often reclaim wood from centuries-old barns in rural areas that are miles from the nearest town. But occasionally we find antique treasures in buildings that are right around the corner from the entrance to the nearest Manhattan subway station. For a project with architect David Bucovy in Manhattan’s West Village, we actually salvaged, milled and re-installed wood that was found within the structure of the jobsite itself—adaptive reuse at its best. 

The house sits along one of Greenwich Village’s most beautifully preserved historic streets, and likely dates from the 1840s, according to Bucovy. Over the years it had been occupied by a cast of New York characters, and though it was originally designed as a single-family home, it was later subdivided into apartments, and even housed a dentist’s office for a time. By the time Bucovy encountered it, the whole building needed structural work, so it was a prime candidate for a gut renovation, which he undertook with Scordio Construction. (The landmarked exterior remained as-is).

 
 
 
 

Some architects and designers approach renovations like this one with an eye toward preserving or reanimating a 19th century aesthetic, recreating interior details that look the part, or finding period-appropriate lighting fixtures and mirrors to visually root the home in another era. Bucovy and his client took a totally different approach: “We had a desire to make it primal and real, rather than a textbook ‘authentic,’ museum-like renovation.” The client wanted to avoid an all-white kitchen and high-gloss paint, and use old world materials instead. “It’s a house about materiality,” Bucovy says, “the story that hand-wrought plaster tells, or woodgrain.”

The home’s renovated interior doesn’t recall that of a typical West Village row house so much as a château in the South of France, with exposed beams, rustic antiques and kitchen tools, and warm plaster walls throughout. The design team avoided painted gypsum board, and instead used a method called tadelakt, a plastering technique popular in Morocco and other parts of North Africa, in which marble dust and plaster are burnished to make a waterproof wall surface. It can be dyed with umber, and has an earthy, ancient look and feel (and indeed, the technique dates back to ancient Rome).

It turned out that some of the original, 19th century wood used throughout the house—a mix of Hemlock, Pine and Spruce, probably local—was perfect for their needs. We worked with the homeowner and the demolition crew and were able to salvage structural timbers and softwood joists. We brought it up to our mill in Pine Plains and processed it as we usually do: removing old nails, resawing and kiln-drying it, ripping, planing, profiling and end-matching the boards so that they could be reinstalled as ceiling and wall panels. We kept the Original Face, which is weathered through a mix of oxidation, patina, and signs of historic use. Bucovy especially likes Original Face for the way “it records its history and imperfections,” he says. 

 
 
 
 
 
 

This aesthetic of exquisite imperfection runs through much of the home’s design and the works of art that the owner installed throughout: wabi-sabi, which is a Japanese concept characterized as the acceptance of imperfection and impermanence. Rooted partly in Buddhist ideals, wabi-sabi celebrates the off-kilter beauty that can be found both in nature and in works of art and design that are asymmetrical, rough, or austere. Bucovy finds inspiration in this concept, and his client happens to be a serious collector of postwar Japanese and Korean art. The aesthetics of these paintings and sculptures happen to dovetail seamlessly with the rustic European look of the interior. Bucovy and the homeowner worked together and sourced both old and new pieces from Belgian art and antiques dealer Axel Vervoort, whose sophisticated farmhouse aesthetic has inspired a renewed enthusiasm for primitive antiques that has thrived despite the lasting dominance of Modernism.

Alongside works of abstract art from Japan and Korea, there are butter-making tools, ceramics, baskets and pieces of furniture dating back to the 1700’s across various parts of Europe. There are Buxy limestone countertops from an extinguished quarry in France. All of these touches complement the wall treatments, hardware and the wood paneling, which has its own story to tell, from 1840’s Greenwich Village, up to the Hudson Valley, and back again in the 21st century.

 
 

Carved by Nature: the Sculptural Appeal and Origins of Mushroom Wood

 
Reclaimed, Char Dyed, Mushroom Wood paneling at McCann Erickson offices in New York City.

Reclaimed, Char Dyed, Mushroom Wood paneling at McCann Erickson offices in New York City.

The paneling that clads the elevator bank walls in McCann Erickson’s New York offices is silky black and heavily grooved, and it looks as though a sculptor has drawn a gouging tool across its shiny surface to make a pattern. But no tools were needed to craft these grooves; in fact, the wood developed these traits after years of service in the cultivation of mushrooms. Though it’s technically a mix of hemlock and cypress, we call it mushroom wood. 

Mushrooms grow wild in the woods, and thrive in dark, damp conditions where there’s plenty of decaying plant matter to provide the organism with energy—no sunlight required. To recreate these conditions, mushroom farmers set up growing beds indoors, often building structures that look a bit like the shelves inside a cheese cave, only they’re prepared with trays of manure and substrate. The beds are built from hemlock or cypress, and the substrate is typically derived from a grain like millet or rye on which the spores can grow. The manure contains enzymes which erode the growing boards over time, and after about fifteen years, they’re no longer suitable for use on the farm.

Mushrooms growing.

Mushrooms growing.

The dark and damp beds of a mushroom farm.

The dark and damp beds of a mushroom farm.

This is the moment when we harvest them: we have a relationship with mushroom growers in the mid-Atlantic region, and we regularly trade old boards for new ones. By the time we get them, the old boards have developed a rich color and texture that makes them ideal for interiors that call for rustic or boldly textured paneling. The design advantage of mushroom wood is, paradoxically, the uniformity of its quirks. The enzymatic erosion weather the wood’s surface substantially, but does so very evenly on boards as long as sixteen feet.

Harvested Mushroom Wood.

Harvested Mushroom Wood.

When the wood arrives at our mill in Pine Plains, we remove the nails, power wash it, dry it in a kiln, then mill it, and it’s ready for use. We offer mushroom wood in four ways. There are two types of mushroom wood that can be used for flooring: Backside with original saw kerf, and New Face. Backside has a rich caramel patina, while New Face is lighter, and more uniform in color throughout. The two Sculpted forms of mushroom wood are suitable for paneling or ceilings, as in this dramatic installation at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Our Sculpted Face, which can be found on the walls of Donostia Restaurant in London, is caramel-colored and has naturally sculpted and radial kerfed faces giving it a complex surface design. Our Sculpted Face can be Char Dyed, as seen in the McCann Erickson offices where it offers a dramatic, sophisticated design element that isn’t fussy.

Reclaimed Mushroom Wood adorns the ceiling of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City.

Reclaimed Mushroom Wood adorns the ceiling of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City.

Reclaimed, Sculpted, Mushroom Wood Paneling at Donastia Restaurant.

Reclaimed, Sculpted, Mushroom Wood Paneling at Donastia Restaurant.

Reclaimed, Mushroom Wood Paneling at a private residence in the desert.

Reclaimed, Mushroom Wood Paneling at a private residence in the desert.

Reclaimed Mushroom Wood, Sculpted, paneling.

Reclaimed Mushroom Wood, Sculpted, paneling.

Reclaimed Mushroom Wood, New Face, flooring.

Reclaimed Mushroom Wood, New Face, flooring.

Reclaimed Mushroom Wood, Char Dyed, paneling.

Reclaimed Mushroom Wood, Char Dyed, paneling.

Reclaimed Mushroom Wood, Backside, flooring.

Reclaimed Mushroom Wood, Backside, flooring.

 

The Hudson Company on the High Line

 
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New York’s High Line is renowned as a botanical oasis in the middle of the busy, formerly gritty neighborhood of West Chelsea. With plantings thoughtfully chosen by Dutch landscape architect Piet Oudolf, the elevated park is home to over 120 species: coneflowers, sumac, grasses and birch trees, to name just a few. Some are native to the region, and some are exotic. But plant diversity on the High Line isn’t restricted to the living specimens that make it lush and green. Thanks to the success of The Hudson Company’s wood-sourcing trip to India in 2017, there is teak to be found on the High Line in benches, steps, seating and furniture. The journey of this wood from a teak forest somewhere in Southeast Asia centuries ago, to exquisite buildings in Hyderabad’s old Muslim quarter, to New York City’s High Line illustrates how architectural preservation—even the accidental kind—can give materials a second life when they’re salvaged sustainably. 

Teak, known to botanists as tectona grandis, evolved for harsh conditions, which is why it’s long been a popular choice for decking material, outdoor furniture, and boats. It’s native to the hot, tropical climates of India, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, and it’s cultivated in parts of Africa and the Caribbean, but half the world’s naturally occuring teak comes from Myanmar. Teak is a hardwood with a high oil content and tight grain, which gives it great tensile strength and a natural resistance to weather. It’s so strong, in fact, that it can wear out metal tooling and blades over time. It’s also very insect-resistant, and tends to be impervious to termite infestations. All of these qualities have led architects and builders in tropical climates to choose teak for centuries, using it to construct doors, beams, wall panels, and floors. Intricately carved screens and pilasters made from teak can be found in buildings throughout Southeast Asia.

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One of the great places to source vintage teak wood elements today is Hyderabad, India. Today, Hyderabad is widely known as one of India’s largest high tech centers (it’s nickname: Cyberabad) and travelers who visit on business are likely to spend most of their time in the city’s modern downtown, which is full of glass and steel high-rises. But old Hyderabad is a treasure trove of historic temples, mosques and houses dating from the 16th century, including Golconda Fort, a former center for the diamond trade and the capital of the Qutb Shahi dynasty. Hyderabad’s historic architecture is distinct, with elements of Hindu and Muslim styles reflecting its complex cultural heritgage. 

Buildings from the 16th and early 17th centuries built during the Qutb Shahi period drew design elements from Persian architecture, with domes and soaring arches. At the beginning of the 18th century, Mughal rulers were responsible for building Hyderabad’s city wall. The families of the Nizam dynasty, which followed the Mughal era and ruled Hyderabad from 1724-1948, built palaces in an increasingly European style, because they ruled as vassals of the British Empire. All of these successive dynasties in Hyderabad represented a mix of different cultures and religions, and as with much of India—and multi-ethnic cities around the world—various populations tended to remain in their enclaves.

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Because it resisted westernization and modernization in the latter part of British period, the largely Muslim older sections of Hyderabad tended to remain intact, if a bit down at the heels. This meant that much of the historic architecture escaped the rush of bulldozing and new construction that has transformed the city’s modern, high-tech center, and remains a key source of beautiful old teak wood. When The Hudson Company visited, we made trips to two sites where well-preserved teak can be found. Demolition in the old city yielded boards as long as 22 feet, some dating back to the 17th century or even earlier. Then we worked with an aggregator who organizes auctions of antique beams, boards, doors, and exterior elements. Ultimately, we gathered 10,000 BF (that’s one shipping container’s worth) of teak, and sent it to our facility in Pine Plains where it was milled. We worked with Friends of the High Line and Sciame Construction to source the wood and find what was needed to craft seating, steps, and other design elements. It’s gratifying to see that these pieces of antique timber, which grew centuries ago in India or elsewhere in Southeast Asia, survived long enough in the buildings of old Hyderabad to be harvested and given a second act in New York City. Visitors may not know the wood’s story, but they can admire its natural beauty and appreciate its impressive weather-resistance on a blustery New York day.

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The pennsylvania barn

 
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This winter, The Hudson Company salvaged lumber from a large 19th century barn in York Springs, PA, a rural farming community in Adams County about 15 miles northeast of Gettysburg. This part of Pennsylvania briefly gained notoriety as a health retreat thanks to the York Sulphur Springs, a summer resort that catered to clientele from Baltimore and Philadelphia, and even hosted George and Martha Washington in 1799. But the construction of the regional railroad shifted traffic away from this part of the state in the 19th century, and it has remained a largely rural enclave ever since. There’s a strong sense of history in this part of the state. Gettysburg was the site of a key battle of the Civil War, and today Gettysburg National Military Park is the most visited battlefield in the United States. Adams County is also the gateway to Pennsylvania Dutch country, and there are nearly 80,000 Amish people—the descendants of Swiss Protestant settlers who eschew modern technology—living in Pennsylvania today. Horse-drawn carriages with bright orange traffic safety signs on the back are a common sight here.

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The landscape and architecture of other parts of Pennsylvania—Pittsburgh, Scranton and Philadelphia—were drastically transformed by mining and industry in the 19th and 20th centuries, but this part of the state remains pastoral and green. So it’s no surprise that Pennsylvania is one of the only states in America that has several styles of barn construction named after it. Robert F. Ensminger, an emeritus professor of geography at Kutztown University, developed a typology in his 2003 book The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Distribution in North America (Johns Hopkins University Press.) Ensminger explains that Pennsylvania’s unique barn architecture is the result of a blending of different European building traditions in collective response to the topography of the region. Immigrants from Germany, Switzerland and the British Isles brought with them the barn construction techniques of their countries of origin, and adapted their designs to suit the landscape they encountered here. He identifies three primary barn types: the Royer-Nicodemus Barn (1790—1900) which were built into hillsides and have overhanging forebays; the Sweitzer or Swisser barn (1730—1850) which are crib-type barns built from logs with overbays and asymmetrical gables; and the Extended Pennsylvania barn, which are taller and wider barns built later in the 19th century with features of the first two types.

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The York Springs structure that The Hudson Company recently salvaged was probably an Extended Pennsylvania barn. It has a forebay typical of the Royer-Nicodemus type, which allowed farmers to easily access both the basement and the levels above it. It also has an asymmetrical gable roof like a Sweitzer, so named for the barn Swiss design that likely inspired it. As farming technology improved and productivity increased in the mid-19th century, form followed function, and farmers built larger structures to accommodate livestock, feed, and equipment. The York Springs barn was three stories tall, and had high ceilings on its second level, with many intriguing features. Carved Roman numerals can be found on some of the beams—this may have been a technique for builders to note where each piece of lumber should go in the structure. The floors were built from wide planks. We refer to rustic wood that comes from the area where wheat was likely separated from the chaff as Oak Threshing. As it was deconstructed, the wood beams that supported the upper floor were exposed, revealing a complex, web-like system of interior struts. These are primarily hand-hewn White Oak, and tend to have wonderful characteristics and quirks like mortise holes and pockets. Now all that the wood has been salvaged in York Springs will become the foundational elements of homes and buildings across the United States, extending the life and reach of this centuries-old regional legacy, perhaps for generations to come.

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Before And After: Reclaimed White Pine From A Finger Lakes Farmhouse

‘Rippings,’ scraps created during the process of milling Reclaimed White Pine planks at The Hudson Company Mill in Pine Plains, NY.

‘Rippings,’ scraps created during the process of milling Reclaimed White Pine planks at The Hudson Company Mill in Pine Plains, NY.

‘Before’ detail of raw material.

‘Before’ detail of raw material.

After being milled by The Hudson Co.

After being milled by The Hudson Co.

Reclaimed & Re-Milled For A Second Life

The photos above and below illustrate just one example of how The Hudson Company works to redirect historic building materials away from the waste stream and then uses our team of skilled craftspeople to re-mill this valuable material so that it can be put to new uses in a wide variety of applications.

White Pine From NY’s Finger Lakes

The planks shown here are antique pine boards salvaged from a historic farmhouse in the Finger Lakes district of NY in 2018. After being transported to The Hudson Company Mill in Pine Plains, NY, the planks were then sorted, graded, and de-nailed by hand before being re-milled.

And while it may have been hard to see the beauty in these old pine planks when they first arrived in Pine Plains, our team of pros has decades of experience in transforming gray, weather-beaten, and antique planks into stunning new floors.

See for yourself in the photos above and below.

Learn More

Explore our full range of quality flooring products.

Learn more about The Hudson Company’s FSC-certified Mill in Pine Plains, NY.

Learn more about our sustainable wood reclamation process.

The Hudson Company team hard at work de-nailing planks by hand.

The Hudson Company team hard at work de-nailing planks by hand.

The tools of the trade.

The tools of the trade.

The end result.

The end result.

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Go Behind The Scenes And Watch The Full Reclamation Process In Action

Installation In Focus: The Carriage House By Workstead, Charleston, SC

The Carriage House, interior design by Workstead, Reclaimed Heart Pine, Vertical Grain flooring by The Hudson Company.

The Carriage House, interior design by Workstead, Reclaimed Heart Pine, Vertical Grain flooring by The Hudson Company.

Reclaimed Heart Pine Heads South

Originally from The Hudson Valley, the talented team of designers at Workstead also have a strong presence in the American South—particularly in South Carolina (their work inside Charleston’s Dewberry Hotel is a must see).

For a recent residential project in Charleston known as The Carriage House, The Hudson Company had the pleasure of working alongside Workstead co-founders Stefanie and Robert to select and custom mill some Reclaimed Heart Pine, Vertical Grain flooring. Since the initiation of The Carriage House project, Robert and Stefanie have moved the bulk of Workstead operations back home to New York and we certainly look forward to working together with their team on more projects in the future (including the interiors of their new luxury, multi-unit renovation project in Brooklyn, opening in 2019).

But, until then, enjoy this peek inside the stunning Carriage House project, designed by our friends at Workstead.

Notes on The Carriage House

Detailed project notes from the design team:

“The Carriage House contains 2,000 square feet of livable space distributed over two floors, with three bedrooms and three bathrooms.  The first floor living room features two gas fireplaces, originally used for cooking and laundering.  A brand new kitchen serves as literal and figurative hearth of the home, with cabinetry tucked under the stairs and a grand island providing the counter around which life revolves.  A cozy window seat situated within cypress and caned cabinets compliments the dining room along the south-facing facade.

The second floor features an anteroom for use as an office or library with an adjoining bathroom.  A south-facing bedroom with windows on three sides includes a cypress-clad closet, while the large master suite is complete with two closets, laundry, and master bathroom.  A balcony overlooks the brick courtyard below with green hedges for added privacy.

At the heart of the Carriage House is connection—with time and place as with collaborators.”

Learn More

Explore More Hudson Company Flooring Installations

Learn More About Reclaimed Heart Pine, Vertical Grain Flooring

See The New York Times Feature Story on Workstead in South Carolina.

Check Out Workstead Full Portfolio and Bespoke Webshop

All Photos below taken from www.workstead.com unless otherwise noted.

Designers and Workstead co-founders Robert Highsmith and Stefanie Brechbuehler. Photo by Kathleen Robbins for The New York Times

Designers and Workstead co-founders Robert Highsmith and Stefanie Brechbuehler. Photo by Kathleen Robbins for The New York Times

At the heart of the Carriage House is connection—with time
and place as with collaborators.
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OUR ANNUAL CLEARANCE SALE: Aug 16-18, 2018

 

BROWSE Featured Clearance Inventory

Click HERE to see the detailed list of all clearance inventory product specs.  including product cut, milling details, grade,  dimensions, lengths, and sale prices.*

*NOTE: This master inventory list and all specs will be updated daily throughout the clearance sales event and details are subject to change.

Learn more about our FSC-certified mill in Pine Plains, NY.