Landscape architecture student Anna Hatcher, ’26, studies the coffee table she’s building, identifying the right supporting pieces to steady its retro-futuristic curved legs. This heirloom in the making is the culminating project of 10 weeks in the Furniture Studio, taught by Steve Withycombe in the College of Built Environments (CBE). Hatcher’s project is made all the more meaningful because she’s built it from elm wood felled right on the UW campus, near Parrington Lawn — thanks to a win-win partnership with UW Facilities’ Salvage Wood Program.
Crew members remove an elm tree in front of Elm Hall piece by piece.
During the removal of an elm tree in 2020, a group of baby squirrels was found and relocated.
Prior to the launch of the program in 2009, campus trees marked for removal would have become merely wood chips. Over the years, the program has grown: In 2016, Facilities acquired a sawmill and then a solar kiln, both necessary for processing trees into more manageable, usable pieces of lumber. Now, thanks to a $72,400 grant from the Campus Sustainability Fund, students like Hatcher can use this wood in their furniture design courses.
Rae Moore, ’17, director of CBE’s Fabrication Labs, says the recent grant funds have been used to build a corrugated metal shed behind the workshop for storing lumber and will pay program manager Morgan Holtz and other Facilities staff for the labor involved in processing and transporting wood for the next couple of years. Moore hopes to secure another grant that would cover building an additional solar kiln so they can process twice the wood.
“My interest is sparked by the discovery that happens when we make the first cut into a log and get to see the wood grain pattern. Similar to cutting into a gemstone, there is an element of surprise."
The wood has to be processed before students can build with it, and the necessary processing stages are both time-consuming and physically exhausting. The time between when a tree is cut down and when it’s ready for use isn’t always the same: A log may sit for anywhere between a couple of days and a couple of years before being milled (cut down into slabs using the sawmill); it then dries outside for a year per inch of slab height before going into the solar kiln for a month or three. It’s ready for use after the kiln drying. Each of these steps involves a host of factors — weather and humidity, pest invasion of the wood, type of tree — and these logs and slabs of wood are so heavy they usually need to be moved by a trained forklift operator (i.e., Holtz himself). “This is a labor of love,” Holtz says. “Our shortest resource here is time.”
Still, he says it’s worth it when he gets to cut into a tree. “My interest is sparked by the discovery that happens when we make the first cut into a log and get to see the wood grain pattern,” says Holtz. “Similar to cutting into a gemstone, there is an element of surprise.”
Steve Withycombe (standing) leads a panel in reviewing Furniture Lab student projects, like Anna Hatcher's coffee table.
The Furniture Studio is a place where students can find those diamonds in the rough — indeed, types of wood like madrona that aren’t readily available commercially — and really make them shine. The course is available to landscape architecture students during fall quarter, architecture students during winter quarter, and, in partnership with the Scan Design Foundation, graduate students during spring quarter. Withycombe says it’s a competitive program that garners a great deal of interest; prior to the Salvage Wood Program, though, it also cost students a great deal of money for materials.
For students, the program means more than just cheap lumber. Each tree has a story — particularly to those walking campus every day — and certain properties that make it suited to one use or another. “Most people don’t get to use wood from the campus — it’s so spiritually beautiful and so emblematic of our time as students here,” Hatcher says. “It doesn’t get more sustainable than this.”
Story by Chelsea Lin // Photos by Dennis Wise
