Turning House Receives Environmental Award

April 28, 2010  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in Green on April 29, 2010

Turning House Millworks, which supplies reclaimed lumber to Turning House Furniture, has received a Triad Green Award for its role in the careful deconstruction of two tobacco storage warehouses at an R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. complex in Winston-Salem, N.C.

The Landis, North Carolina, millworks salvaged every piece and type of material that it could from the warehouses, which date to the 1920s and 1930s, including 230,000 linear feet of wood for its sister company, Turning House Furniture in Bassett, Va. The millworks reclaimed and renewed the vintage, Southern longleaf pine for its rebirth as fine furniture through the sister company.

The two companies Chairman and CEO, Spencer Wood Morten III (also chairman and CEO of Bassett Mirror Company), was one of three joint recipients of the award for resource recovery made by the Triad Business Journal during ceremonies on Earth Day in High Point. The other two recipients were R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and D.H. Griffin Wrecking Company Inc.

Together, the three entities saw to the reclamation of wood from a total of a dozen warehouses that was the equivalent of 1,400 trees or 92 acres of full-growth forest. Once upon a time, demolition materials ended up in landfills. In this case, aluminum siding and tin roofs were salvaged for reuse; Even the buildings€™ foundations were recycled after being razed. R.J. Reynolds has re-contoured and reseeded the cleared land.

The timbers reclaimed by Turning House, which came from trees that dated to the 1800s, have character that comes only with age and from the nail and worm holes, along with mineral streaks, that tell the tale of the wood. The millworks specializes in salvaging such hard-to-get, first-growth timber Southern longleaf pine, which once covered the South and was highly prized for its tensile strength.

"Turning House is more than a business that just sells wood and furniture," Morten said. "We help communities revitalize by removing old industrial buildings, recycling materials that used to end up in landfills. In the process, we are able to re-purpose the wood as fine furniture, offering consumers an alternative to furniture built from fresh-cut timber."