by aleida, on December 2nd, 2009
Image courtesy of Aged Woods web site
Greenbuild 2009 was an incredible platform for us from a material sourcing perspective. We touched base with companies whose products we know very well, and met others who had a lot to teach us about their offerings.
One of the first people Kevin and I met was Jeffrey Horn, the president and co-founder of Aged Woods, a purveyor of reclaimed flooring based in York, Pennsylvania. We sat down to chat before the opening of the expo floor, and were able to learn about the origins of this reclaimed wood business. Jeffrey and an ex-partner founded Aged Woods in 1986, when Jeffrey decided to leave his career designing and selling public address, nurse call, and closed-circuit television systems. They started by taking apart old barns, re-milling the boards, and selling them as flooring. One challenge that the partners encountered early on was how to accurately identify the types of wood that they were purchasing. In one example, the initial survey of a barn showed that it was made out of American chestnut. Once it was dismantled and transported to the mill, they realized it was actually all red oak. These small kinks in the system, though, did not prevent them from generating interest in their then-novel offerings.
While clients, architects, and designers met the reclaimed flooring with great enthusiasm, those boards weren’t always well received by everyone. Jeffrey recounts how flooring installers and contractors “would take a look at the boards and say, ‘I know the client didn’t order this crap. This is old wood; it’s dunnage.’” But despite that negative perception, installers eventually came to respect what the company was doing with reclaimed wood, even if they didn’t necessarily value the end product. One particular installer working on a Manhattan apartment once told Jeffrey: “Personally, I wouldn’t give you two cents for this.”
Image courtesy of Aged Woods web site
Today, Jeffrey’s 23-year-old company exists in a field awash with competitors, and reclaimed flooring is a hot item all around. The company’s growth means they no longer deconstruct the barns, but rather source the reclaimed material from a large grassroots network of smaller operators who do the dismantling themselves. Barn wood arrives at the York, PA mill from Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, naturally Pennsylvania, and sometimes Illinois and North Carolina. The finished flooring uses wood that is no younger than 75 years, and that can be up to the 200-250 year-old range. Aside from extensive domestic use, their finished products have also been incorporated in projects in Montreal, Bahrain, Switzerland, Thailand, Japan, London, and Paris, among others.
Jeffrey mentioned an incredible statistic: in the re-milling process, 50% of the raw material becomes waste in the form of rippings from the sides and edges, and saw dust. Aged Woods takes that waste and sells it to a company that pelletizes it, so that nothing is sent to the landfill.
Image courtesy of Aged Woods
The bulk of their product comes from dressed barn board, though they do carry heart pine, chestnut, oak, and maple reclaimed from other structures, such as old factories. Since the majority of their product is sourced from within a 500-mile radius of their mill, projects located within that radius that incorporate this company’s flooring would be sourcing a truly local material.
We encourage anyone looking for this kind of material to consider Aged Woods as a possible supplier. They have truly beautiful products.
Thank you, Jeffrey, for your time!
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