The byproducts, though, depress me slightly. I imagine boomers building 4,000-square-foot second homes in Colorado smug in the fact that their beams came from railroad trellises in Thailand. Obviously better than a cheap faux colonial in a gated community that's going to collapse in 20 years after giving the occupants cancer from off-gasing, but couldn't those boomers have just given the land to the Nature Conservancy and stayed in the small-footprint city? The wood's history also serves as a sad reminder that we're losing or mutating beyond recognition so many beautiful buildings and structures -- factories, bridges -- so quickly. The repurposed wood can never be as gorgeous as it was in its first iteration, where it took on the organicity bestowed by time. A reclaimed floor signifies postlapsarian tragedy, saying: "You no longer live in a world where an old barn could sit in a field doing nothing but rotting and looking scenic, where cheap tenement housing had better wood and craftsmanship than the most überluxe mansion built today, and you never will again!"
To find really ambivalence-free shopping, you have to delve deeper into the reclaimed wood movement to a small group of furniture designers who get involved locally with the actual sourcing of their wood, and are as concerned with pushing design forward as they are conservation. People like Brent Comber from Vancouver, British Columbia, whose elegant side table of alder trunks bonded vertically into a clean 16-by-16-inch or 20-by-20-inch cube has been picked up by British lifestyle guru Joseph Conran for his Conran stores as well as II HK, a new store in Manhattan that sells only environmentally progressive products that also, hopefully, have a strong original aesthetic.
"It's a constant struggle to find things for the store that aren't reminiscent of hippie," explains James Kloiber, who was grateful to discover Comber's tables.
Stephen Mitchell, the owner of Sublime in Tribeca, which showcases American design, also struggles to find products. He got interested in looking for alternatives after trying to develop a couch with the Sublime label, and learning about the huge amount of waste that goes into making new furniture. "Most of the stuff I see at the furniture fairs that's reclaimed just isn't exciting, design-wise," he says. He's carrying Joseph Hauptman's reSeat compressed wasteboard mid-century modernesque chairs, a bed by Richmond, Va., woodworker Anthony Brozna made from a storm-felled 100-year-old walnut tree from playgirl-heiress Doris Duke's estate in New Jersey, and pieces from Scrapile by Bert Bettencourt and Carlos Salgado.
About a year ago, Brooklyn-based Bettencourt, a self-taught furniture maker with a degree in English, and his collaborator, fine-arts trained Carlos Salgado, started fooling around with the scrap wood leftover from an old project in Bettencourt's Williamsburg studio. Creating a closed system of reduce/reuse had become particularly alluring. The two were already interested in sustainable materials, and had devoted part of their business to distributing wheat and sesame board -- materials they had had a hard time getting access to when they started going eco -- and making bamboo furniture for clients like fashion designer Donna Karan. Bettencourt and Salgado treated the variously sized chunks of wood like children's building blocks, with a functional piece of furniture the finished puzzle. Using low-formaldehyde glue that doesn't off-gas, they built a minimalist coffee table whose only decoration was the geometric adherence lines between the blocks. They built a few more. The pieces sold quickly from their studio and a few local stores, and pretty soon they were out of scrap.
"We learned about New York Waste, an organization that tries to match a business up with another businesses' waste," explains Bettencourt. There were several larger manufacturers with excess scrap, so the duo just had to show up on garbage day and load up their van from the dumpsters.
"[Piano manufacturer] Steinway is one of the best places -- they have such high-quality wood," says Bettencourt.
Next page: The closest you can get to guilt-free consumption