Welcome to Berry Hill Timber Frames' Web Site. As the founder of BHTF, I'd like to tell you a little about myself and my company.
In 1984, I received my first opportunity to work on a new timber frame structure. It was a small barn frame, in rough white pine. Although I continued to work in conventional carpentry, the experience awakened the heritage I received from both sides of my family; boat builders from St. John, New Brunswick, and windmill builders from Helsingborg, Sweden. What appealed to me about the forms also touched my Puritan Yankee roots: pureness of line; solidness of structure; simple, understated elegance found in the marriage of form and function; the timeless appeal of classically proportioned space.
After a brief sabbatical as a history teacher, I went back to carpentry, specifically timber work. I realized I had a knack for it, and in January of 1989, I started my own timber framing business.
I have to admit a certain amount of idealism was involved; I couldn't
help being thrilled with the big wood, imagining a return to an idealized
past, where we builders built for the love of the work, and the pay was
gravy on the potatoes. Of course, hindsight more often than not paints
a rosier picture than reality was experienced at the time. Yet, each and
every frame we do has a bit of this idealism in it. No two have ever been
the same, except in the high standards we expect from ourselves. The result,
I believe, has been work that appeals immediately to the intuitive sense
of beauty and proportion we all carry within us, and to the succeeding
layers of satisfaction that those of us who intellectualize forms continue
to look for, after having walked into a space and felt that first intuitive
reaction.
All of the frames BHTF produces strive for that magic aesthetic found in a successful marriage of form and function. A frame, and the space it encloses, which appeals to us immediately. And, in our dreams for the future, which speaks to those who will live and work in them so many years from now.
Charles "Chip" Swanson
