Why Timber Frame? Why SkyeHomes?

by John MacLeod

Above - John MacLeod at his site in Shawbost

Late in the summer of 2003, when I achieved a lifelong ambition and became the proud tenant of a croft in my mother's native village on Lewis, I immediately hatched plans to build a house.

And I meant a real house. Something with a steep-pitched slated roof and white roughcast walls and sturdy wooden window frames and all the rugged lines of Granny's Hielan' hame.

That, of course meant “brick and block.” Not timber-frame. Not, oh help, one of those vast, sprawling concrete-tiled affairs, with yawning picture windows and pink pebbledash. One of those mock-hacienda jobs for some mystical Mediterranean corner of the Hebrides where it never actually rains and you can get away with a roof pitch so shallow you couldn't roll a grapefruit down it. A ghastly, Sid-and-Nancy El Cheapo where, like Crossroads Motel, the walls wobbled whenever you slammed a door.

Then, one afternoon, a friend rang and told me about SkyeHomes.  I understood his excitement when I checked out the website. Indeed, I pinched myself. Here were real, solid Highland houses, the sort that looked as if they'd been standing on this or that cove of Loch Snizort since the early 1900s – and yet indisputably, indubitably timber-frame.

Above - John's grandfather Murdo MacLean on his croft in Shawbost with the house he built in 1932. With him is his son Calum who is John's Uncle

It wasn't long before I started to terrorise the good people of SkyeHomes by call, letter and email.  It wasn't long before I stood inside a sturdy “Kilmarie”, then under construction, to punch a wall or two and shake Graham Campbell warmly by the throat.  And it wasn't long before I asked, “Where do I sign?”

SkyeHomes are based in Skye, natch – so, by ordering a SkyeHome, I've done my bit to promote industry and enterprise in my own West Highland heartland, which really matters to me.

But they also promote, with quiet fanaticism, a “look” - the posh word is “vernacular architecture” - in West Highland housing which has, in recent decades, been under mounting threat from a distinctly alien and unattractive form of housing.  Yet beneath that timeless SkyeHomes look stands a timberframe thicker, and several times stronger, as any offered by the big and heavy competition.

And from their Portree lair the good people of SkyeHomes offer a range of lovely designs for every taste and budget, each home drawn up to be built to the highest specification and the very latest in heat and sound insulation.

And, when I actually checked out the realities of timber-frame construction, it was a salutary and eye-opening experience.  Far from being a sort of Get Rich Quick flim-flam building method devised in the late Sixties, timber frame construction has been with us for hundreds of years.  The basic principle is that the weight of your roof is carried by an incredibly strong skeleton of interlocked wood, rather than by internal walls of brick and plaster. (The external walls on any house, however it is built, don't actually carry anything. They keep the wind out and stop the neighbours laughing at your towels.)

Anyway, our ancestors in the Middle Ages worked this out near a millennium ago, somewhere between Harold Hardrada and the Black Death, and from the half-timbered charm of Ye Olde Tudore Pubbe to the oak-framed splendour of a robber-baron's castle, timber frame has, as they say, Been Around.

It's not all timber, of course. Indeed, the phrase “timber frame” has unfortunate connotations; you think tragic holiday chalet; post-war “prefab” or one of those clapboard shacks in the Wild West. A SkyeHome is built on concrete foundations, like any other house, and finished snugly with immaculately roughcast walls of concrete block, like any other house. It'd actually be much fairer to call it timber and block. And, when your SkyeHome's actually built, I'd defy your worst enemy to crawl by in his sad car and spot the difference.

But did you know that over 80% of all new houses built in Scotland are now by timber frame construction, “open panel”, “timber and block” or whatever you want to call it? Or that, in fact, most “traditional” houses still use open-panel stud-and-plaster walls for their first-floor partitions anyway?

And did you further realise that SkyeHome's distinctive designs, in all their Back To The Future beauty, weren't just pulled out of the air to be cute but because these shapes, angles and traditional slates actually work best in a West Highland climate best described as exuberant? (When a hurricane blasted the Hebrides of 12th January 2005, it laid waste barns and forests, washed away piers, demolished a Benbecula school and stripped entire roofs. Not a single SkyeHome lost more than a few slates.)

Above - The early stages of the kit erection

Once I actually cast aside prejudice for fact, I made three very important discoveries about timber frame construction.

First, and all other things being equal, it's the fastest way of building your new home. The complete first-stage frame can, granted ample daylight and kindly winds, be erected in a single day. On average, and with a well-organised build, you can save quite a few weeks over brick-and-block and – unlike any construction method heavily dependent on wet cement – you can carry on happily knocking up a timber frame in the good West Highland rain.

Secondly, a timber-frame house is unbelievably and gloriously warm. There is no better method of construction for effective heat insulation and a timber frame house heats up, even after months of Arctic absence, much quicker than a brick-and-block one. SkyeHomes have especially high standards of insulation in their designs and, as a timber frame house has no “cold spots”, you won't get any condensation.

There's a still bigger selling-point – timber-framed construction is very, very kind to the environment. Wood is a renewable resource and forests do their vital bit to soak up CO2and preserve our ozone layer. A typical SkyeHome, or any half-decent timber frame design, is an energy-efficient wonder that helps conserve scarce fossil fuels and minimise pollution. Should one day, unkind churls demolish your SkyeHome – and, by all accounts, they'd have to do a lot better than the 12th January Hurricane – then all that timber and slate can readily be recycled.

There isn't much you can do with flattened brick-and-block, except landfill. And forget about wobbly walls and drifting bedroom chatter, by the way. Modern timber-frame homes have thicker partitions and splendid noise insulation – in any event, most sound is structurally borne; a wooden staircase is just as noisy in a brick-and-block house, and a Black & Decker drill screeching through a wall is infinitely worse.

So check timber frame out and, especially, take a good long look at the splendid designs and solid kits now gladly flogged by SkyeHomes. They're big, bold and bonnie – and offer a lot of bang for your buck.

John MacLeod has not been paid, bribed or bought for this article. No Graham Campbell was harmed in the making of this movie.

ENDS

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