Special Wood Projects

Pecky Cypress, Poplar Shiplap and an Ipe Porch

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:42:19 GMT

Some houses are defined by one material. This one is defined by how many different ones had to work together — and by the fact that nearly all of them came off the same shop floor.

A pecky cypress ceiling

The interior ceiling is pecky cypress, and it is the first thing anyone notices. Pecky cypress carries the irregular pockets left behind by a fungus in the standing tree — harmless in the finished board, and impossible to fake. It gives a ceiling texture and shadow that a flat material never will. Because no two boards are alike, it wants to be laid out with some thought, which is exactly the kind of material we like handling.

Poplar shiplap, solid poplar mouldings, maple plywood

The walls are poplar shiplap with mouldings milled from solid poplar — not finger-jointed, not wrapped. Poplar takes paint beautifully and machines cleanly, which is why it is the standard for painted interior trim done properly. Closets are maple plywood. Small detail, but it is the kind of thing that separates a custom home from a nice one.

Outside: hemlock ceilings, ipe decking, KDAT brackets, cedar shingles

The porch ceilings are vertical grain clear hemlock. The porch decking is ipe — the densest common decking hardwood, hard enough to blunt tools and rated for decades outdoors, which is why it keeps winning on coastal porches. The exterior brackets came out of our own fabrication shop in KDAT: kiln dried after treatment, meaning the lumber is pressure treated and then dried back down, so it goes up stable instead of shrinking and checking on the wall over the first year. Most treated stock skips that second step. On an exposed structural bracket you can see from the street, it is worth insisting on. The walls are SBC cedar shingles.

One supplier, one shop

Pecky cypress, poplar, maple, hemlock, ipe, KDAT and cedar shingles — seven materials, one delivery schedule, one phone number when something needs sorting. That is the part builders tend to appreciate more than the species list.

See what our fabrication shop can build or talk to us about your material list .

Old Growth Cedar Meets the Intracoastal

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:33:06 GMT

Waterfront property in Wilmington asks more of a building material than almost anywhere else in North Carolina. Salt in the air, humidity that swings hard between morning and afternoon, driving rain off the water, and full sun with nothing to break it. Most siding does not have a good answer for all four at once.

Why old growth vertical grain western red cedar

For the exterior of this home we milled old growth vertical grain western red cedar. Vertical grain matters here: because the growth rings run perpendicular to the face, the board moves far less across its width than flat sawn stock, so it stays flatter and holds a finish longer through the wet-dry cycling a waterfront site puts it through. Old growth adds tight, consistent growth rings and a higher proportion of naturally rot-resistant heartwood. Western red cedar brings its own decay resistance and dimensional stability to begin with. Put together, it is about as durable a wood cladding as you can specify, and it looks like nothing else.

Inside: select cypress, clear pine and vertical grain hemlock

The interior is where the material list gets interesting. Select cypress paneling and mouldings , clear pine, and vertical grain clear hemlock paneling and mouldings. Cypress is a southern wood with natural oil in it and a warm, quiet grain that suits a house on the water. Vertical grain hemlock gives you long clean runs with almost no knots — a calm ceiling and wall surface that lets the view be the thing you look at. All of it milled here in our own shop, which means the profiles match, the moisture content is right for this climate, and nothing had to be ordered from three states away and hoped for.

How it has held up

The house sits on the waterway and has taken everything the coast has given it since. That is the argument for specifying the better material at the start: on a waterfront build, the cost difference between adequate and correct disappears the first time the weather does something serious.

Building on the water in the Wilmington area? Talk to us about species selection before the siding order goes in.