For over 40 years, we have considered sustainability a good basic practice that should inform the entire design process. As a residential architect, I am often asked by my clients if there are exotic materials that will create features in a home different from those typically used…and express their personal lifestyles. The home construction industry has now moved to embrace green, sustainable design, at the same time that clients are seeking environmentally-friendly solutions. All of these trends add dimension to residential design and contribute to better stewardship of the global neighborhood. Our firm supports this synergy.

A friend and client of ours in Lampasas, Texas, Herb Pierce, of Bell House Ranch Lumber, has been in the lumber business for more than 25 years. Herb has developed some of the most imaginative sustainable solutions to environmental challenges presented by homebuilding. Herb is inspired by trees. He knows that wood has strength, vitality, and unlimited potential to be transformed into attractive and useful products for homes. At the same time, his lumber business uses processes that take his company to one of almost zero waste. One example is his use of Mesquite. “Texas Ironwood” is hard and durable. Yet, it’s hard on woodworkers and tools, even mechanized ones. Many people, especially ranchers, consider this tree a nuisance because it’s a nature bully and competes with everything else for water. In Central and West Texas, the Mesquite is often blamed for lowering the water table and is hazardous to livestock. Ranchers and farmers usually destroy it. Herb takes advantage of this fact and works with clearing companies to salvage the material.

Herb’s lumber company hauls away the logs which are normally burned by clearing crews and turns them into beautiful lumber. Bell House Ranch shreds the remnants and makes them into BBQ wood chips. The result: Bell House provides exotic sustainable durable products for homes and furniture, and at the same time, removes a ‘thorny’ nuisance.

We used Mesquite in our design for this Texas Hill Country home, as seen in the photos below (fireplace mantle, rocking chairs). We also used Herb’s Forest Stewardship Council FSC-certified heavy fir timbers in a regional modern sustainable design, also shown below. These timbers were shipped directly from Herb’s mill to the job site, reducing costs and damage from handling.

Among the cleared Mesquite, Bell House Ranch also comes across rare Texas ebony, a wood that is hard and very dense (it will not float). The colors of Texas Ebony heartwood range from a dark chocolate brown (almost coal black) to a dark brown integrated with thin striping of lighter brown.

Also available through Bell House are antique timbers, recycled from older structures. Use of the “embodied energy” of historical timbers, saves existing forests, energy, and space in landfills. The timbers lend a rustic character, as well as a narrative, to the home’s design. Another way to amplify ambiance is by the means and methods of putting materials together, their jointery. Examples of this are shown below in the 1856 Dog Trot Log Home (pictured below right) and the Sustainable Regional Modern Home (pictured below left) and in mortice and tenon long leaf pine trusses (pictured above left).

Herb Pierce’s Bell House Ranch Lumber is the quintessential model of American ingenuity: entrepreneurial, proactive in the protection of the environment, and provides elegant building products for clients.