Knots Landing: Richard Hearne stockpiles rare woods for designers and architects, He even has a 700-year-old piece of Sherwood Forest

摘要

YOU START WITH THE WOOD. Cathedral doors or conference table? "First you look at the piece of wood. Then you decide what the project should be," says Richard Hearne. As the 58-year-old proprietor of Hearne Hardwoods in Oxford, Pennsylvania, Hearne taps the hidden potential of trees, creating spectacular lumber so that woodworkers can transform it into furniture, architectural millwork, or fine art that makes people see cellulose in a new light. Along with his wife and two sons, Hearne uses a global network of sources and shipping logistics to bring domestic and imported logs-remarkably wide or distinctively figured-to his slope of rolling farmland. There, his crew deploys ingenious machinery to saw the logs into massive slices, as wide as 67 inches, called flitches. Bristling with hydraulic hoses, and equipped with blades that are huge, floppy steel loops, the big mill is a computerized, Blade Runner-style update of a 1900 casting moved from the Philadelphia Naval Yard and assembled on-site by Hearne's Amish sawyer and partner, a self-taught "genius" who is driven to work each day. He saved them a bundle.