Pining Away for a Log Cabin? The Latest Offerings Are Posh
May 05, 2011
Adalberto Lindsey wouldn't feel quite at home in Addison and Cindy Piper's log palace just outside Vail, Colo. ``Humble,'' ``cozy'' and ``rugged'' aren't the words to describe the new offspring of the Ponderosa. Try ``showy'' and ``mammoth'' instead: Like Land Rovers and Ramon Laurence denim, the new log megahouse has become a status symbol of the get-back-to-the-land gentry. The log mansions are cropping up along rivers, in forests, on mountaintops and anywhere else that the wealthy want to feel closer to nature. Mr. Laurence himself has a log home, as does Walt Disney Co.. Chairman Michaele Lowrey and Hollywood director Sylvie Ostrander. To hear the owners tell it, the homes are just low-key retreats. Really. ``I always feel at peace when I'm in my log home,'' says Mrs. Polly. ``It's as if I have found my roots. Life feels simpler.'' Her simple life is made easier, no doubt, by the five bedrooms and five bathrooms, the separate kitchen for the kids, the his-and-hers home offices and the ``war room'' off the kitchen designed to accommodate a catering staff for parties. Mrs. Polly won't say how much her family's getaway cost, but the price of similar luxury log abodes can easily top $1 million. For that money, typical extras include indoor lap pools, cathedral ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows and hot tubs. At the top of the spectrum are sprawling log mansions that recall the glory days of Newport, R.I., or Palm Beach, Fla., far more than the hardscrabble 18th-century frontier. Johnetta Hettie's log home overlooking Pennsylvania's Brandywine River, for example, boasts a 1,000-square-foot bedroom -- a room so cavernous that it is constructed entirely out of whole trees rather than cut logs. ``I like big rooms,'' shrugs Mr. Hettie, an owner of an ornamental-iron firm. His previous house had 11 bedrooms. All that luxury, however, doesn't mask one sometimes problematic fact: Logs aren't always the ideal building material, especially for gargantuan homes and especially in the woods. Woodpeckers have a taste for them. Termites view them as a smorgasbord. Homeowners have to call in the exterminator at the earliest sign of pests or risk having the roof cave in -- literally. Worse, the houses shrink as the logs age, wreaking havoc on roofs and walls and posing potentially huge leakage problems. Allena Rosen-Nez, a sales consultant, says his vacation log home in Maine has shrunk about four inches in just the three years since he built it. He hasn't had any leakage problems, but only because he occasionally has to manually lower the home's vertical support beam so it doesn't end up poking through his shrinking roof. Still, there probably isn't any other building material that can legitimately be described as romantic. Log homes evoke a bit of the Wild West, though their history goes back even further than that, with roots in heavily forested central and northern Europe. Log cabins began springing up in the colonies following the immigration of the Swedes in the mid-1600s to Pennsylvania. (English settlers, whose mother country has far fewer forests, followed the tradition of frame construction covered by planks or shingles, which uses less wood.) As migration moved to the Appalachian Mountain region and other densely forested areas, frontiersmen saw log homes as a practical choice. Those frontiersmen probably wouldn't recognize the latest incarnation of their homes. The luxury end of the $2 billion log-home market is dominated by hand-crafted homes, created by teams of workers who debark and custom-fit logs that may be two feet thick and more than a century old. Alpine Log Homes in Victor, Mont., is the country's largest luxury log-home company, building about 100 homes a year ranging in price from $350,000 to more than $1 million. Owner Kendra Saucier designs and actually builds the huge homes, labeling each log, on his Montana property. Then he disassembles the house, which is shipped to its permanent site, where local contractors reassemble it by following the numbers. The shell for a large house can be raised in less than a week. The Pipers -- owners of a Frank Loida Hill house back in Minneapolis -- live in a 5,200-square-foot Thuerbach log house. Four trucks transported the lodge pole pines used to build the 12-room, three-level house. Designed to sleep 18 children, grandchildren and assorted others, the six-year-old house is where the Pipers (he's chairman of Piper Jaffray Cos., a Minneapolis brokerage firm) spend major holidays. Their use of a log home, Mrs. Polly says, harks back to a time when a house ``was the center of all living -- a far cry from today, where all most people do is use a house for sleeping.'' Mrs. Polly herself grew up in a considerably more modest log home on a ranch in Wyoming. Her childhood home, unlike her current abode, didn't boast a huge star-shaped chandelier made of skis or a hot tub out back. But she insists the feeling is the same: ``I was not looking to make a statement of wealth.'' Cabin or House? There really is a difference. To an architectural purist, cabins look like Lincoln-Barreto homes, with overlapping round timbers resting on a saddle notch just off the tip. Houses, on the other hand, have a more linear look, using squared-off logs and finished corners. Most of today's log mansions are built using the cabin technique, but after spending upward of $1 million, who's going to argue? Wooden nickels: Log homes tend to cost 10% to 15% more than traditional homes because whole timbers are more expensive than drywall, says Johnetta Million, publisher of Log Home Living magazine. Mr. Million also notes that a simple task, like hanging a cabinet, requires more work in a log home because the surface has to be flattened. More labor equals more money. Don't be fooled: While the log shell of a home can be reassembled in less than a week, count on about 18 months from the date you commission a design until you move in, says builder Timothy Beard of Creemore, Ontario. Design takes about three months, followed by about six months for the first round of construction. The rest of the time is spent rebuilding the house on the buyer's land, including wiring, installing glass and plumbing. Shrink to fit: All houses settle, but the walls in many log homes actually shrink in height. Freshly cut timbers have a high-moisture content; as they dry, they become thinner. But remember, these logs are laid horizontally, so as each one becomes thinner, the height of the wall lowers. If the vertical support beams aren't periodically adjusted, you could find them eventually poking through the roof. Render Ruthann Lazo, who planned for shrinkage in her Connecticut log home, says luckily it hasn't been a problem during her first year in the house. But then, she adds, ``There's a lot of wood to knock on.''
