As a young carpenter apprentice in Switzerland, Simon Gnehm fell in love with timber framing.
It wasn’t just the outdoor work and smell of sap and sawdust that appealed to him. In those days, most timber framing work in Switzerland was roof construction, and Gnehm found that he liked the feeling of being over everyone else on a job site.
“It’s almost an ego thing, but you’re up high, you’re above everybody else almost literally and figuratively, and it’s an adrenaline rush when you’re up high on the roof,” he said.
Today, 30 years after completing his apprenticeship and obtaining his engineering degree from Berufsschule Lenzburg (trade school of Lenzburg), he runs his own timber framing company, Dovetail Timbers, in Durango.
Upon immigrating to the United States in 1996, Gnehm settled in Boulder.
He found a job on a framing crew, slapping two-by-fours together with a nail gun. He hated the work, so, in pursuit of starting his own company, he began seeking the specialized tools he’d used to timber frame houses in Europe.
He placed a call to a tool company in Port Townsend, Washington, which directed him to a distributor in Buffalo, New York.
The distributor told Gnehm that not only could he get him the tools, but he knew a timber framer who was hiring in Boulder, just 2½ miles from the room where Gnehm was making his call.
For the most part, his work uses wood joinery, rather than nails or screws to construct homes and other structures.
He works with his clients to make sure the structure turns out exactly the way they want it, but he takes every chance he gets to advocate for more traditional methods.
“I’m more passionate about just doing it all in wood, rather than, you know, using some metal fabricated stuff,” he said.
Gnehm carefully selects the wood he uses and its source in order to best serve the customer and the planet.
“We have to be careful today, because cutting down big old trees is not the most popular thing to do,” he said. “But it’s an industry, it’s a crop, it’s a harvest. And as long as we do it (in a sustainable way), it’s OK. But I’m not a big fan of old growth stuff. That’s just not cool.”
For example, if trees have to be cut down in order to build the structure, Gnehm tries to incorporate them into the design.
“Think about a mantle piece above a fireplace, and that thing doesn’t really create much conversation, but if that was a tree that grew where the house is built now, that is that completely changes the dynamic,” he said.
Gnehm prefers to work with spruce, or Southern Yellow Pine, which have good structural properties. No matter what kind of wood he uses, he has to consider that it will shrink over time.
“The classic example is actually a log home,” he said. “If you stack logs on top of each other horizontally, they will shrink multiple inches over the life span of when it’s built, until it’s totally dried in and you’ll hear that. You’ll hear cracks, you’ll hear pops, and so it’s alive in a way.”
Gnehm says his favorite project is always his current project. However, almost nothing compares to the opportunity to restore a 19th century Pennsylvania barn in summer 2017.
He said restoring those buildings, especially barns, to replace rotten timbers is “really, really special.”
