Hull Forest Products made custom Red Oak rift and quartersawn wood flooring for the new Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin residential colleges at Yale University in New Haven. Photo copyright Peter Aaron/Otto for Robert A.M. Stern Architects.
When Yale University new residential colleges architect Robert A.M. Stern specified rift and quartersawn Red Oak floors from Yale’s own university forests, Hull Forest Products made that dream a reality.
Dorm rooms at Yale’s new residential colleges feature Hull Forest Products flooring! Photo credit: Peter Aaron/Otto for RAMSA Architects.
As a woodland management service and a sawmill, Hull Forest Products was able to plan and undertake a timber harvest in Yale’s CT forest. Together with Red Oak logs from Yale’s NH forest, this timber became the stock for the flooring. Hull Forest Products trucked the logs to its Pomfret, CT sawmill, sawed them on its band saw, then air and kiln dried the lumber before custom milling it into the 5 inch wide solid Red Oak plank flooring that now graces the Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray Colleges. This wood helped increase the percentage of locally sourced materials used in the project, helping it earn Gold LEED certification.
Wood flooring was used throughout the common areas of Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin Colleges, including the head of college houses.
Sustainably harvested rift and quartersawn Red Oak from Yale’s own forests was used throughout the project, including flooring for the head of college houses. Photo credit: Peter Aaron/Otto for RAMSA Architects.Project: Pauli Murray College and Benjamin Franklin College Architect: Robert A.M. Stern Architects; RAMSA Location: New Haven, CT.Project: Pauli Murray College and Benjamin Franklin College Architect: Robert A.M. Stern Architects; RAMSA Location: New Haven, CT.
In addition to manufacturing wood flooring, Hull Forest Products stewards over 50,000 acres of working forests in New England, helping to keep these forests as forests. Hull Forest Products has earned an Environmental Merit award from the EPA for its role in conserving forestland in New England.
For more info on our products and services, visit hullforest.com or contact us at 1-800-928-9602.
Figured Birch wide plank floors by Hull Forest Products in a Newport Beach, California home. Hull wide plank floors and the company’s forest-to-floor sustainable business model have been featured in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, Designer Pages, Apartment Therapy, and Dwell.
Hull Forest Products will be exhibiting its show-stopping wood floors at the 2019 Architectural Digest Home Design Show at Pier 94, 55th Street at Twelfth Avenue, New York City, March 21-24, 2019.
Hull Forest Products, southern New England’s largest sawmill and woodland management service, is participating in four family-friendly educational events this fall that highlight sustainable forestry in New England. We hope you will join us to learn about working forests and the many benefits they provide to our region!
Each fall the Hull Forest Products forestry division offers guided woods walks of woodlands managed by Hull Forest Products to help teach the public about working forests and sustainable forestry.Hull Forest Products will be at Celebrating Agriculture Day at the Woodstock Fairgrounds, September 22, 2018.
Celebrating Agriculture Day, Saturday September 22, 2018 9am – 3pm at the Woodstock Fairgrounds in Woodstock, CT. Celebrating Agriculture Day started in 2001 as part of an effort to promote community education and participation in agriculture, as well as to support consumer purchasing of local farm products. Each year, the goal is to welcome more people to learn who our farm neighbors are, and how to support local agriculture to enrich and maintain the open space — the working landscape — of our area. Hull Forest Products will be on hand with information about working forests and how they provide many public benefits. We’ll also have samples of our USA-made wood flooring on display.
The Massachusetts Outdoor Expo (The Big Moe), Sunday September 23, 2018 at the Hamilton Rod & Gun Club, Sturbridge, MA from 9am -4pm. Free admission, free parking. With over 45 outdoor activity stations ranging from building bird nest boxes (with pine lumber donated by Hull Forest Products) to archery, shotgun, fishing, and wilderness survival skills, this is a great event for the kids.
Family Forest Tour, from 10 am – 11:30 am on Saturday October 13, 2018 at 68 Ballamahack Road, Windham, CT. Join Hull Forest Products foresters Chris Casadei and Michelle Wood as they lead a two-mile walk at the Andrychowski Family Forest, a 100-acre property that has been actively managed for timber production for over 40 years. Participants will learn about recent forest management practices on this working landscape and observe several different forest types, evidence of colonial settlement. and beautiful views of the adjacent Lake Marie on the Joshua’s Trust property. Directions: From Route 14 take Ballamahack Road 200 feet past mailbox #68; the road turns sharply left; park in the field on the right at the sharp turn. For more info. contact Hull Forest Products (860) 974-0127.
Hatchet Hill Hike, from 1:30-3:30 pm, Sunday October 21, 2018 at 1914 Eastford Road (Route 198) Woodstock, CT. Join Hull Forest Products forester Mike Bartlett for a guided 1.5-mile woods walk in the Walker Family Woodland, which has been managed for recreation, wildlife, and forest products for over 60 years. This walk includes interesting geological features and one of the best scenic vistas in the Last Green Valley. Directions: The forest is located on the west side of Route 198, two miles north of the intersection of Routes 198 & 197. For more info. contact Hull Forest Products (860) 974-0127.
Intermediate installation training at NWFA University, with Hull Forest Products.
Flooring installers attending a National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA) University class at the NYC District Carpenters Union in July 2018 were treated to lunch and a presentation by Hull Forest Products, Connecticut’s largest hardwood sawmill and a great resource for contractors in the New York/New Jersey and Boston metro areas.
Flooring sales consultant Belinda Culp was on hand to answer questions and present the installers with information on Hull’s manufacturing, which includes custom unfinished and prefinished solid wood floors, nested bundle floors, trim, moulding, and staircase parts.
Hull Forest Products just earned the “Best Of Houzz 2018” customer service award – the company’s sixth award in a row from Houzz.com, the leading platform for home remodeling and design.
“We work hard to make wood floors like no one else, and we are thrilled that our American-grown and manufactured wide plank floors have proved so popular with the Houzz community,” says Mary Hull, co-owner of Hull Forest Products. “People feel good about choosing our floors because they are unique, beautiful, sustainable products whose use helps protect working forests here in the United States.”
“We’re delighted to recognize Hull Forest Products among our “Best Of” professionals as judged by our community of homeowners and design enthusiasts who are actively remodeling and decorating their homes,” said Liza Hausman, vice-president of industry marketing for Houzz.
Follow Hull Forest Products on Houzz or browse our wood floors at hullforest.com.
Live sawn wood floors are sawn straight off the log, allowing for wide planks with a variety of grain patterns.
Live sawn White Oak floors are a customer favorite, with good reason. This type of wide plank wood flooring has beautiful and unique grain, is extremely durable, and offers excellent value. Read on to learn more of what’s to love about the live sawn cut:
1. Live sawing is a traditional method of sawing wood flooring that creates a beautiful grain pattern.
Live sawn White Oak floors are also known as “European center cut floors” or “French Oak floors” because this saw cut was popular in the old world. The saw passes straight through the log from the outside diameter through the heart, creating the widest possible boards and utilizing as much of each log as possible.
An oak log sits on deck at the Hull Forest Products sawmill in Connecticut. When we are making live sawn wood floors, our band mill makes a series of straight cuts all the way through the log.
Because each live sawn plank contains a mix of clear and natural grade wood, the flooring is an accurate representation of the inside of each individual tree. Wide live sawn planks include some of each of the grain styles: rift sawn, quarter sawn, and plain (also known as flat) sawn.
Illustration 1: This graphic demonstrates the different types of saw cuts and the resulting grain pattern of the boards.
2. Live sawn wood flooring is an extremely durable wide plank flooring choice.
Live sawn planks contain both radial grain (grain that runs perpendicular to the growth rings) and tangential grain (grain that runs parallel to the growth rings). This grain mix makes live sawn boards very stable – even at wider plank widths. We dry the floor boards carefully and mill the backs with stress relief to prevent cupping. As a result, we confidently offer our live sawn White Oak solid wood flooring in widths up to 14 inches.
3. Live Sawn White Oak floors are environmentally friendly.
The live sawn cut offers the best resource utilization of all the saw cuts. It conserves the majority of the log with very little waste. Superior resource utilization is one reason why this cut was so popular in the old days. Waste not, want not.
4. Live sawn White Oak wood floors work with modern and traditional interiors.
Live sawn White Oak floors offer one of the best values in wide plank flooring. They are an affordable luxury compared to their close cousins, rift and quarter sawn floors. (Rift and quartersawn floors result in a higher waste factor so they are more expensive.) Live sawn floors offer a very wide plank floor with the stability of quarter and rift sawn floors at a fraction of the price.
Wide plank wood flooring in the kitchen? Yes. Wood adds a warm and organic element to what is often the most modern room in the house. Wood also contrasts well with sleek or metal kitchen surfaces. On trend for 2018, more homeowners are choosing to add wide plank flooring as a way to put their unique imprint on kitchen remodels.
Here are a few examples of kitchens that created one-of-a-kind looks with our custom wide plank wood flooring:
Our select grade American Cherry wide plank wood flooring brings color to a white kitchen.
Imagine the white kitchen above with a more neutral color floor – without the reddish floor, this room would have a totally different look. The rich red hue of the American Cherry plank flooring really warms up this kitchen’s color palette.
Our premium grade American Hickory wood flooring with grain and color variation enlivens an all white kitchen.
The wide plank hickory floor in the modern Boston kitchen shown above also adds warmth and interest to an all white kitchen, but in a very different way. In this case, the wood character and the color variation between hickory’s pale sapwood and darker brown heartwood create the wow factor.
Our Curly Birch wide plank flooring in a coastal kitchen, Newport Beach, California.
Another white kitchen, the California example (shown above) used figured Birch wood flooring to create a unique and contrasting interior.
Also be sure to check out more examples below from our Houzz profile. Hull Forest Products was voted Best of Houzz again – for 2018. This makes seven awards in a row now because our floors and and customer service are so popular with users.
Comfortable as your favorite blue jeans, you’ll love our rift and quartersawn White Oak floors. This photo is from a customer home in East Hampton, New York. The stain used on the floor was a Minwax blend – 6 Golden Oak to 1 Honey.
For those of you interested in quarter and/or rift sawn wood floors, we’ve put together this post to show off some of the quarter and rift sawn wood floors we’ve made for clients lately.
We are always happy to send samples of our wood floors, but sometimes it’s hard to tell from a single board how that look will translate across an entire room. We find nothing helps people make up their mind about a floor more than seeing finished room-setting photos. [Note: If you have installed our wood flooring, we encourage you to send us a photo!]
There is something very classic and comfortable about rift and quartersawn White Oak that makes it work with many decorative styles, from minimalist (as show in the Greenwich Village studio (above) to this more traditional Long Island home (below).
Our select grade 8″ wide quartersawn White Oak floorboards in a Setauket, Long Island home. This floor has a light brown stain and a Sutherland Welles Murdoch tung oil finish.
At our sawmill, when we quarter and rift saw a log for flooring, we first quarter the log, then we slice into it, as show in second and third images of the diagram below.
Exhibit 1: Types of saw cuts and the look of the grain that is revealed on the face of the boards. Notice that the live sawn cut, which cuts straight through the log, contains all three grain types.
As a result, the radial and vertical grain of the wood is revealed instead of the tangential grain. The rippled figure and flecks of medullary rays that you see in quarter sawn wood (second image from the left in Exhibit 1, above) are highlighted when the wood is cut this way. These ribbon-like cellular structures run perpendicular to the growth rings, and they are responsible for transporting nutrients to the tree via sap.
We can make you with a floor that is all quarter sawn grain, all rift sawn grain, or a blend of the two, which is a very popular look. One of the benefits of quarter and rift sawn wood, besides the different grain pattern, is extreme dimensional stability. This makes quarter and rift sawn wood floors ideal for demanding installations, such as over radiant heat.
This Gramecery Park apartment features our rift/quarter sawn select grade wood floors, darkened with a Jacobean stain.Upper East Side apartment with our rift and quartersawn select White Oak flooring.
Another way to change up the look of a quarter and rift sawn wood floor is to use a grade with character markings like the floor shown below.
Rift and quartersawn White Oak with knots, character markings, and skip planing has a vintage look and feel.
Visit our White Oak gallery and click on any photo to get specification and pricing information for any of our floors. Have questions about our floors? Give us a call 1-800-928-9602.
Seniors from Pomfret School’s Environmental Studies class tour Hull Forest Products.
Each year hundreds of students from local elementary schools, high schools, and colleges tour the Hull Forest Products sawmill in Pomfret, CT to learn about forestry and wood products manufacturing. 2017 school groups included students from Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Burrillville High School in Rhode Island, and the advanced environmental studies class from nearby Pomfret Preparatory School, where teacher Annie O’Sullivan has been bringing her students to the Hull sawmill for several years now. We asked Ms. O’Sullivan to describe what role Hull Forest Products plays in her students’ learning:
“Our students have had a fantastic time touring Hull each fall for the past couple of years. I first took a tour as a grad school at Yale Forestry, so was eager to connect once I started working at Pomfret. In the fall we have a unit on Forest Ecology, so the students spend time in the Pomfret [School] forest learning their trees and about forest ecosystems in general. They then learn a bit about forestry management and why landowners might cut trees to encourage growth.
I have them think about where their wood products come from (they don’t know, except from Ikea), so that’s why we take the trip to Hull Forest Products. It’s there that the students really grasp for the first time how this natural resource they are so familiar with (red oaks) are turned into the flooring we see towards the end of the tour. They are usually pretty into the debarker and seeing the saws operating with the lasers.
My course is really about educating students about sustainability. Thus, I am trying to get them to understand that we use natural resources like water and food and trees, and that’s okay – being an environmentalist is not about rejecting all commodities. It’s really about how we grow and use them that determines what our future will look like. Hull is an amazing place for the kids to see that process right in front of their eyes.”
Burrillville High School students tour an active timber harvest with Hull forester Chris Casadei to learn how and why woodlands are managed.
In the fall of 2017 students from Burrillville High School had the opportunity to tour an active timber harvest with Hull forester Chris Casadei, seeing how and why particular trees are marked for harvest. The students also toured the Hull sawmill to observe the manufacture of forest products from local logs. Students were able to see the entire process – forests being managed sustainably for the production of timber, the breaking down of logs on on a band head rig, the flow of boards through the sawmill and its dry kilns, and even the secondary manufacturing of flooring from some of this lumber.
Students tour the wood flooring shop at Hull Forest Products to watch as lumber is turned into custom wide plank wood flooring.
Public outreach is an important part of every forester’s job – and we encourage our entire team to help educate the public about the vital role that forests ad forest products play in our ecosystem and economy.
Want to learn more? You can visit Hull Forest Products at these upcoming events:
March 17, 2018: Connecticut Land Conservation Conference, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT
March 22-25: Architectural Digest Home Design Show, Pier 94, NYC
March 23-24: JLC Show, Providence, RI Convention Center
March 27-29: New England Society of American Foresters winter meeting, Nashua, NH: New England Forest Stories – The People – The Management – The Technical Knowledge
July 10-12: NWFA Intermediate Wood Flooring Installation, NYC
Clients came to architects David Burdett and Stefanie Werner of DAS Studio in NYC with a design dilemma: their lakefront house did not take advantage of the property’s views. And the building was divided into many small rooms, creating awkward spaces that were not functional for contemporary living. The clients wanted a clean, light, and modern aesthetic, but they also wanted to pay tribute to their home’s rural setting and past.
The solution that DAS crafted involved gutting the house to create new, larger interior spaces that maximized the lake views. To honor the homeowner’s modern aesthetic while simultaneously acknowledging the home’s rural location, they came up with the idea to use a very traditional wood floor, wide plank pine flooring, but to finish the floor with a white stain for a light, clean, modern look. The homeowners, who were both actively involved in researching and selecting the products used in their home, turned to a local sawmill, Hull Forest Products in Pomfret, Connecticut, to make their wood floors. Hull Forest Products, which ships its floors mill-direct nationwide, was able to supply wide pine floors up to 19 inches wide with plank lengths of 12+ feet.
To achieve the look shown above, the floor was stained with one coat of Duraseal Country White. Then the floor was lightly buffed and sanded, and another coat of Country White was applied. The floor was then finished with four coats of Duraseal Traffic water based poly, satin finish. The grain pattern of the pine floors and the white coloring were a perfect match to the project’s design criteria.
To link the three floors of the house functionally and aesthetically, the homeowners commissioned custom thick stair treads from Hull Forest Products, who made them from the same wood used on the floors. The stair treads are a perfect match for the floors, and they create a seamless flow between the home’s three levels. The stairs function as a bridge between floors and time periods, for, as Burdett points out, “the stair design contrasts the chunky heaviness of the solid wood treads with the slender detailing of the [modern] steel stringers and balustrade.”
The completed house, with work done by West Mountain Builders of Washington, Connecticut, displays the successfully executed design and vision in every photo. As Burdett says, “It is a contemporary renovation of an older house, working with existing proportions and heights to achieve a contemporary living space that is respectful of the original house.” The home is a poster child for how to reconfigure an old house to be a gracious and suitable host for a whole new generation.
Resources:
Custom wide plank floors and stairs by Hull Forest Products, CT, www.hullforest.com
Design by DAS Studio, David Burdett and Stefanie Werner, www.das-studio.us
