What Is Local Wood?

When you talk to us about our local wood, we are talking about wood from trees that grew within Santa Barbara County, if not within Santa Barbara's city limits. Our woods are exotic hardwood species grown in our own urban forest. We provide our customers with a photo album of the trees original locations and provide you with information about where those trees grew, why they came down, and what happened to the wood from the moment the tree came down to the moment it was installed in its end use. Our hardwood floors include a plaque that describes where that wood came from, when the floor was installed, who it was installed for, who installed it, what kinds of wood are in it and a Local Wood serial number.

How do we get the wood?

Upon hearing about the work we do, a few people have imagined that we prowl around town cutting down beautiful trees from city parks and people's backyards to supply ourselves with logs. Nothing could be further than the truth! We are putting to good use wood from logs that would otherwise go to a landfill, be burnt as firewood or simply left to sit and rot. Based on our conversations with tree service companies, we estimate that there are about twenty large trees coming down in the Santa Barbara area EVERY DAY! We are touching only a tiny fraction of the free, organic, sustainable wood supply already available from our own local urban forest. Our goal is to one day save and put to use all of the valuable logs from our urban forest currently being thrown away. We believe that producing hardwood flooring is the best way to do that since almost everyone likes hardwood flooring, whereas the market for fine furniture, cabinetry and the like is much more limited. By making the best hardwood flooring we possibly can, we believe our business will prosper, allowing us to reinvest our profits into the business to make it as green as possible. Though the investments required to run our machinery on solar-electric power, our truck on bio-diesel, and hopefully even our saws on ethanol will cost a great deal of money, it is our goal to build the world's first 100% green and sustainable wood products business. Everything we do along the way is being documented so that we can show people how it's done and why it's important, from our customers to woodworkers the world over.

Why is Local Wood the most environmentally responsible choice?

Our flooring is produced from an abundant local resource that currently poses a large waste disposal problem for the community. Energy expenditure in the production of our flooring is minimized by very little transport, the use of simple, low-powered machinery and solar-powered drying. The trees our wood comes from are, practically speaking, dry-farmed (no irrigation) and entirely organic. At every step and in every aspect, our flooring is the most environmentally-friendly. If you love wood and want the greenest choice in hardwood flooring, go with Local Wood.

Want more information on Local Wood?

To download our brochure please click here.

To contact us please click here.