We wanted the new space to be a physical expression of what we strive for in craftsmanship, stewardship, and managerial practice.  So we constructed the project from reclaimed and recycled materials and asked the architects at Scott Edwards Architecture to design an open floor plan that facilitates communication.  They did a fantastic job on the office tenant improvement design (Learn more about our office tenant improvement services).  It’s a great space to work in.  The unsung hero in this design? The office’s upcycled sliding doors.

The flexibility of sliding doors makes perfect sense for Hammer & Hand’s busy office environment.  The two sliding doors are hung from a top rail, with no rail at bottom – guided entirely with 3 cleverly-placed router bits (a.k.a. following bits) embedded in the floor.  A connecting swing door completes the three-door “triptych”.

Open, the doors facilitate collaboration and exchange between staff and management, and connect the office of founders Sam Hagerman and Daniel Thomas with the adjoining conference room and overall office.  Closed, the doors create sound-dampening for a private suite, yet allow light to penetrate.  Whether open or closed, the doors’ translucency maintains the architectural intent of open space.

Upcycling is central to both the interior aesthetic as well as our overall construction philosophy.  The office’s building shell is clad in rough barnwood stock that we’ve been collecting from disassembled local Oregon barns for years. We laid the floors with reclaimed bleacher stock from local schools.

Our carpenters constructed the doors entirely from items otherwise left for dead: framed with reclaimed, planed barnwood, complete with iron stained nail holes and powder post beetle tracks, and glazed with reclaimed glass panels created by Second Glass from junked windshields.

The swing door boasts two recycled pull handles, one vintage hammer from my grandfather and another retired hammer from a veteran Hammer & Hand carpenter.  The doors therefore use both the embodied energy of upcycled materials as well as their embodied narrative, with the hammer pull handles paying homage to both the founding of our company as well as to the men and women who make it thrive today.

Though just one element of our new HQ, the upcycled sliding doors really encapsulate the fine and responsible work that we strive for.

– Zack

P.S. Learn more about our commercial remodeling work.

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bright designlab has designed several groovy lines for us, including RoLL, FoUND, STaCK, WRaP and SiT.  They’re must-see pieces (at least in our opinion!) that draw on left-behind materials for beautiful, sustainable, modern furniture.

As our friend Alissa Pulcrano at bright designlab says, “Upcycled Furniture is a step above recycling because we’re not burning energy to break materials down.  Instead, we’re reassembling.”

We hope you’ll join us on Saturday!  Our booth will be directly in front of the cool furniture store Porch Light at 3972 N. Mississippi Ave.

In the meantime, check out this video of bright designlab’s 3d modeling of three lines of furniture:

And this video of photos of more furniture:

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It’s the wildly popular and tasty brainchild of Chef Aaron Adams and his biz partner Dinae Horne.

We first met Aaron and Dinae when their shop was located two doors down from our HQ.  But with the crush of folks flocking to that location, Portobello quickly outgrew the space.

Aaron and Dinae recently opened their new, more expansive digs at 1125 Southeast Division Place and it’s a really cool spot.  An entire long wall is clad with a collage of reclaimed wood that Dinae and Aaron sourced from all over Portland, and whimsical pen art depicts forest plants and creatures throughout the space.

What’s more, the table tops and bar counter top were created by Hammer & Hand from upcycled barnwood.  Take a look at the pics by bright designlab.  Pretty nifty…

-Zack

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Upcycling utilizes materials otherwise left behind, rendered useless in their original intent.  By creating new pieces made of reclaimed barnwood, retired school bleachers, vintage locker baskets and salvaged steel piping, we give industrial materials slated as waste a new purpose.  Hammer & Hand and bright designlab have joined forces to build modern, sustainable furniture, with each piece derived from found items, sourced and fabricated locally by our master craftspeople.

WRaP

STaCK

FoUND

RoLL

and FARM.

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As green builders and craftspeople we think the theme of upcycling is super rich, touching on ideas of both embodied energy and embodied narrative.  After all, each slat of wine barrel flooring has a story to tell about forestry, cooperage, winemaking, and modern-day efforts to “build green”.  It’s easy to get passionate about using materials like this in our work.

The Inhabitat piece brought up a number of direct parallels to our upcycling efforts here at Hammer and Hand, efforts that cut across all aspects of our business, from new home construction and remodeling to furniture design and manufacture.

1. Floors – We’ve systematically stockpiled reclaimed wood for years to use in new building and remodeling projects, including barnwood and retired “bleacher stock” taken from local university gymnasiums.  This wood serves as beautiful, warm flooring in both residential and commercial contexts.  The photo here shows our treatment of the holes left from the carriage bolts that fastened the wood to the bleacher structure.  We embedded little sentimental items selected by the project owners into the holes: added narrative.
2. Cladding – We also clad buildings in reclaimed barnwood including, most recently, wood reclaimed from a barn at Oregon State Mental Hospital, site of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.  That’s some serious embedded narrative.  Stories of Oregon timber, forestry, health care, literary history, movie culture … it’s all there.
3. Furniture – These modern furniture pieces use reclaimed barnwood and bleacher stock as well as vintage locker baskets and salvaged steel piping.  The modernist designs give industrial materials slated as waste new purpose.
4. Wine Barrel Staves in Construction! – Speaking of upcycled wine barrel staves, we recently finished a garage conversion/accessory dwelling unit for a wine enthusiast couple that employs wine barrel staves as balusters in the upper loft (as well as wine bottles as a structural/decorative element in an exterior wall).  The design physically expresses two of the couple’s interest and values – love of wine and low-impact living.

Jargon alert: What is “upcycling”, exactly?  Wikipedia has a good explanation here.

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We’re committed to reclaiming and repurposing materials in our upcycled furniture and as a basis for green remodeling and green building.  So we were glad to see that Forbes magazine ran an interview with William McDonough, author of “Cradle To Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things”.  McDonough discusses the net-zero energy building he’s designing for the NASA Sustainability Base at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field (pictured here), as well as the “our poop became food” lesson that he learned while growing up in Japan.

His critique of the prescriptive “benchmarking” of LEED and his emphasis on producing net-zero energy buildings is also firmly in line with Passive House principles.

The interview includes a slideshow of products that are Cradle to Cradle certified, including a brand of bottled water (ostensibly due to its recycled plastic content and the fact that Whole Foods will recycle it).  That seems like a stretch … it’s hard to think of bottled water as a “green” product, even if the production of the bottles aligns with Cradle to Cradle principles.  (But let’s not throw the baby out with the bottled water.)

-Zack

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This afternoon I had the pleasure of sitting down with M.A.C. Casares, “project wrangler” for builder and remodeler Hammer and Hand, to discuss a new cabin that he recently managed and built in the forest near Rhododendron, Oregon.

Designed by Giulietti Schouten Architects and built on the foundation of an existing pre-WWII cabin, the structure is a gorgeous composition of warm, inviting wood and enticing custom details.

“It was a fun project,” says M.A.C. “Hardly any wood went in that wasn’t either reclaimed or repurposed in some way.  To know that you had to meld all those different materials and styles and make it look like it was part of one thought process … it was a great mix.”

In talking with M.A.C., three overarching themes emerged for the cabin design and construction:

1.   Reclaimed/repurposed material.
While the existing pre-WWII cabin was taken down for construction, its foundation and chimney were incorporated into the new structure.  M.A.C. and his team bored a whole through both sides of the chimney to create a new, two-sided gas fireplace.  All wood from the original cabin structure was saved and stockpiled on site for reuse during the construction process, with the roof sheathing repurposed as interior paneling next to the new fireplace.  Strap hinges salvaged from the original cabin grace the cabinets of the new kitchen.  The shiplap cedar used throughout the interior was sourced from downed trees salvaged from the property and milled on site.  The fireplace mantle piece and interior staircase treads are 4x14s taken from a demolished warehouse from NW Portland.  “Reclaimed wood comes back to the forest”, quipped M.A.C.

2.   Use of industrial materials to create a unique woodsy/NY loft vibe.
Industrial materials like #5 rebar, salvaged gas pipe, and a repurposed locker basket are fused with this reclaimed wood to create a groovy and very unique aesthetic, part woodsy cabin, part Manhattan loft.  You see this melding throughout the cabin, as part of the stair railing, or the interior ladder, or the built-in curtain rods, or the custom “dumbwaiter” basket-pulley system that allows quick snack deliveries between the kitchen and loft sleeping space overhead.  And this aesthetic is taken a step further with little details like the pieces of flattened coffee cans and food tins placed behind the knot holes in the shiplap cedar to fill in the wall gaps.

3.   Juxtaposition of custom-built details and flex space areas. 
You’ve got to love the details.  A graceful curve in a handrail here, two different custom-designed ladders there, old-school vapor lights used in the kitchen here (you know, the ones you see on big ships), and 50s period hardware there.  But this customization doesn’t hem things in.  Quite the opposite.  The cabin is flexible, with doors that fold away to connect the great room with the outdoor room of the screened porch, and carefully-placed curtain rods throughout that allow the owners to screen off sleeping nooks as guest party size dictates.

The project photographs (courtesy of bright designlab) speak for themselves.  Kudos to M.A.C., Roman Emery and team for creating a beautiful cabin full of style and soul.

-Zack

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Our friend Michelle Jeresek of Departure Design graciously agreed to write this joint post about one of our two projects to be featured on the Build It Green! Home Tour coming up on September 25, 2010.  (By the way, you can follow Michelle’s tweets on Twitter: @michellejeresek.)  Please read on …

NoPo Duplex Conversion (aka “Twin Studios”)
Owners Becca and Eric envisioned modifying their 1902, 1,500sf split-level home into a duplex, with one unit above and one below.  Their planning background and strong design sensibility helped drive a deeply collaborative design process with Departure and Hammer and Hand.  Working strategically to maximize value, the remodel focused on elements with the biggest “bang for the buck”, including a small modern steel-clad addition at the rear of the home.  A fully-accessible garden-level unit created through a complete basement conversion/remodel is accessed through the rear courtyard.  A communal backyard fosters a sense of community with adjacent neighbors (including Becca and Eric’s own home).

Sustainability in Design
As designers and builders, we see or role as stewards of the built environment, so we worked to honor both the embodied energy and embodied narrative contained within the building’s original structure.  The goal was to create a lasting design and to build it with lasting craft – the definition of fundamental sustainability.  Big sustainable design notions are at work, like:

• increased density
• compact living (750sf units)
• modest build-outs
• repurposing of an existing building
• shared, community backyard
• aging-in-place with accessible design

Sustainability in Materials
While the duplex incorporates a full suite of sustainable building features, materiality was particularly key.  We preserved embodied energy with salvaged and long lifecycle materials:

• The deconstructed chimney reappears in the courtyard paving.
• All of the original doors were relocated and reused within project.
• Original wood siding from Becca and Eric’s adjacent home clads the new addition.
• A salvaged bathtub and sink from the ReBuilding Center finish the upper unit’s bathroom.

This reuse, repurposing and upcycling pays homage to the story of the building and its community context.

Kitchen
The duplex features two hyper-efficient and charming kitchens that support the project’s goals for compact living and affordable design.  Careful design packs a full modern kitchen into just ten-and-a-half lineal feet.  Compact appliances and extra deep counters ensure that spaciousness and utility aren’t sacrificed.

To squeeze more design impact from a limited budget, we customized Ikea cabinets with finished plywood detailing.

Please join us on the Build It Green! tour and check out this project, as well as our Musician’s Dwelling, for yourself.

– Michelle and Zack

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Connie and Morgan Curtis’ ideal for the new home was an open layout for joining creative people who share a common interest in making music and art. The small-footprint infill project integrates living space with an active work studio for jazz, painting and videography. A garage flex space on the ground floor will function as a future accessory dwelling unit.

The home was born out of a deep design-build collaboration between designer, builder and architect-client.  The team’s ongoing working process was nimble and responded rapidly when reclaimed materials became available in the marketplace, allowing the team to maximize sustainable use of materials and avoid expensive warehousing.  With affordability an ever-present concern, the team attained a high level of both environmental and financial sustainability for the clients.

As stewards of the built environment, the project team worked to create a lasting design and build it with lasting craft – the fundamental definition of green building.  Three big sustainable design notions are at work:

1. Increased Density: The infill project is embedded into the existing urban fabric of a highly walkable neighborhood, easily integrating a new structure into the City’s urban core.  This supports walking, biking and transit, and promotes a tight urban growth boundary.
2. Simple Compact Design: The project’s design and layout creates a light-filled and airy environment within a compact footprint.  Simple, open designs consume fewer materials and resources.  The project’s straightforward kitchen, simple bathrooms, and open floor plan free of walls benefit the environment and the wallet.
3. Live/Work Space: By providing clients with space for both working and living, the structure saves energy and natural resources that would otherwise go to commuting and work infrastructure.

Throughout the project, the team sought to preserve the embodied energy of building materials by reclaiming, repurposing and upcycling at every opportunity.  The previously existing garage was deconstructed and stockpiled for future projects.  Wood from the barn at the Oregon State Mental Hospital (of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest fame) was reclaimed and upcycled to clad the building, bringing forth that material’s embodied narrative of Oregon forestry, health care, literary life, and cinematic heritage.

The project also emphasized long lifecycle, low maintenance, and durable materials.  With the project’s extruded aluminum exterior windows, linseed oil-coated wood, commercial grade metal roof, concrete paver roof deck, and cement fiberboard panel siding, the house will require little maintenance.  Minimizing maintenance burdens – with their impact on personal time, resource consumption, and household budgets – is vital to supporting sustainable living.

While the overall design is one of simplicity and restraint, the project’s big design moves are about playful contrast.  Rustic reclaimed materials are juxtaposed against clean modernism.  Bright and glossy surfaces interplay with natural hues.  Sculptural forms play against rustic ones.  The main level, with its 12-foot ceilings and large volumes of space, contrasts spatially with the compact “tree house” bedroom penthouse upstairs.  But the compactness of this upstairs space is made spacious by generous windows and doors.  On the exterior, the strong, linear, commercial roof plays off rustic barnwood siding, which contrasts with refined classic white trim.  And the exterior’s modernity is nudged by traditional window patterning at the corner.  Everywhere we find playful paradoxes.  The end result?  An exciting and cost-effective design.

–Michelle and Zack

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Passive House: Sunday’s New York Times piece, “Can We Build a Brighter Shade of Green?” features a central Vermont Passive House that is so smartly-built that it requires no furnace.  Pretty cool stuff that illustrates why we at Hammer & Hand are so excited to be part of this cutting-edge of sustainable building.

The piece mentions the higher cost of Passive House homes, and there’s no question that thicker walls do cost a bit more.  But the cost savings from avoiding large, traditional heating/cooling systems helps offset the increased building envelope cost.  Sam Hagerman (owner of Hammer and Hand and Passive House expert), points out that the house featured in the article has a complex shell that retains timber frame elements not required by the Passive House standard.  In other words, the project owners opted to incorporate expensive elements not necessary for Passive House.  Typically, Passive House projects cost 10-15% more to build than conventional homes, an investment in energy efficiency that easily pays for itself in ongoing energy savings.

Build It Green! tour:  Saturday’s Build It Green tour included a couple of Passive-Houses-to-be, as well as two groovy Hammer & Hand homes built in collaboration with Departure Design.  The weather cooperated nicely with the tour’s 1,000 green building fans.

Bicyclists arrive at “Curtis Creative Small Infill”.  Lead carpenter Steph Lynch answers questions about the home.

H&H owner Daniel Thomas hangs upstairs.  Dan Lajoie of Departure Design charms visitors.

Entrance to “Engstrom & Werlin Duplex Renovation”.  Participants hang out at the garden-level unit.

Tour-goers speak with Michelle Jeresek of Departure Design.  H&H’s lead carpenter Alex Daisley shows the kitchen.

The tour winds up at the fair at EcoHaus, where our friends at bright designlab showed samples of our Upcycled Furniture line.

Heartfelt appreciation goes to our clients for opening their homes to the tour.  And thanks, too, to the many enthusiastic tour participants and their kinds words about the projects.  It was a heady, sunny, green building blowout.

–Zack

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