Old-Growth Finds the New World
By Luke Jerod Kummer
Published by The New York Times - March, 15, 2007

Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times Robin Howe and Andy Grossman.

The house that Robin Howe and
    her husband, Andy Grossman,       share in Bridgehampton, N.Y.,
         is only a year old, but their            living room floor dates back a century. Made of wide-
plank teak, the floorboards have "a lived-in feel that is attractive,old and gentle on the feet," said Ms. Howe, a fashion designer.

Before the boards were in Ms. Howe's living room they were in the McCloud, Calif., warehouse of TerraMai, a company that sells so-called "reclaimed" wood from around the world; before that, they were the floors and walls of a factory, probably near the Burmese border in Thailand, 8,000 miles from Long Island.

Richard Humphries/Polaris, for The New York Times
Foreign Exchange Teak houses like this one in Thailand are being disassembled by wood traders, who sell the lumber to American homeowners like Robin Howe and Andy Grossman in Bridgehampton, N.Y.

As Southeast Asia continues to modernize, many teak-wood homes and buildings like that factory are being torn down and replaced with Western-style brick or concrete ones. While this architectural turnover has been going on for decades, in recent years American companies like TerraMai have increasingly been buying up the old-growth teak wood and selling it to homeowners like Ms. Howe, which has raised some concerns among preservationists.

"In the last three years, our sales of reclaimed teak have tripled," said Erika Carpenter, TerraMai's co-founder. "People are becoming aware, appreciating the material and designing their projects around it."

In 2006, the company disassembled 12 structures in Southeast Asia, and this year Ms. Carpenter expects to tear down about 20. The wood, which sells in the United States for between $16.50 a square foot and $30 a board foot — slightly more than new teak from the same region would cost — is re-milled and used to make flooring, decking, countertops, staircases and cabinetry, among other things. (For teak flooring, the cost is about three times that of a typical oak floor.) Global Surroundings, a furnishings manufacturer near Phoenix, has had similar success with its Rusteaka and ChicTeak lines of outdoor furniture made from Indonesian homes. According to J. L. Jackson, the company's founder, Global Surroundings imported six shipping containers of vintage teak furniture in 2006 and will double that number this year.

Ms. Jackson said she initially had difficulty convincing retailers to stock her tables and chairs, but an increased interest in the environmental benefits of recycled resources has helped spark sales, as has the popularity of outdoor furniture, for which old teak is well suited. Then there's the matter of character. "You have to buy into it, and understand that this is a great story when you're sitting around your coffee table," she said.

Old teak lumber seems to hold much the same appeal for many Americans. "They've definitely had previous lives," Ms. Howe said of her floorboards. "There's a history in them that may be hundreds of years old, and I've become a part of that." Not everyone, though, is happy to see Westerners like Ms. Howe claiming a place in that history. Tanet Charoenmuang, the vice president of the Urban Development Institute Foundation in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which advocates for historical preservation in the rapidly modernizing city, is worried that his country is slowly losing its identity, as old teak villas, docks, hotels, tobacco barns and granaries vanish.

"Houses are sold one after another after another, and, finally, all gone," Dr. Tanet said. "Finally, the culture will be gone, too." Although Ms. Carpenter, like other importers of reclaimed wood, says that she only purchases buildings that were going to be demolished anyway, or are already for sale, Dr. Tanet believes the money offered by these dealers inevitably encourages teardowns. "At first, someone may have never thought of selling" a home, he said, but the financial incentive, combined with the growing popularity of Western-style brick and concrete houses with modern conveniences like air-conditioning, has spurred the selling off of teak. The result, Dr. Tanet said, is that "the wooden culture gives way to the concrete." Nonetheless, Jeffrey Hayward, an auditor for the Rainforest Alliance conservation organization, who lived on the island of Java in Indonesia for six years, sees some benefit in the demand for vintage teak, in that it promotes reuse. "If there was no market for recycled teak," said Mr. Hayward, who witnessed a similar selling off on Java, "it would basically end up as waste."

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Recycled Retreat ~ The teak gazebo in the Oakland, Calif., backyard of Dr. Richard Ostreicher,is made from an ornate Indonesian home. He said he was drawn to the hand-carved wood in part because “you’re not taking down any new trees.”

The perceived ecological advantages of building with vintage teak appealed to Dr. Richard Ostreicher, a California-based dermatologist who drives a hybrid car and owns a vacation house in Hawaii that uses solar power. When he wanted to put a gazebo in his Oakland backyard two years ago, he bypassed the big-box home stores and found a structure made of teak from an old joglo, an ornate style of Indonesian house. "It's original, it's gorgeous and you're not taking down any new trees," said Dr. Ostreicher, who bought the gazebo from Gado Gado International, a furniture and crafts importer in Santa Rosa, Calif., paying about $11,000. "This is a beautiful work of art, and if it were just left on the road somewhere it might be lost."

After years of these supplies being depleted, many countries in the region have strict laws limiting over-harvesting, and oldgrowth teak has become a rare commodity, according to Mr. Hayward.

Richard Humphries/Polaris, for The New York Times
What Price Teak? ~ Erika Carpenter inspects the floor of a teak house in Thailand. She often pays $50,000 or more for a house, then re-mills the wood. Some preservationists say that traders like her encourage tear-downs.

Finding and exporting this sought-after old-growth teak is the job of hunters like Ms. Carpenter, who has gone on buying trips to Southeast Asia every one to three months since TerraMai began selling teak in 2000. On one such trip last July, she visited a village outside Chiang Mai, on a tip from one of TerraMai's local agents that a woman there was interested in selling her house. Approaching the home in question, one of a row of simple but sturdy wooden structures raised on stilts, she scratched a support beam, sniffing for the sharp, leathery smell of teak. A white-haired woman sitting at a table nearby pointed to garlic drying beneath the raised floor and asked Ms. Carpenter if she had come to buy some. "No," Ms. Carpenter told the old woman in Thai, "I came to buy the house."

After locating the property owner, a middle- aged woman, Ms. Carpenter spoke to her through an interpreter. The owner exexplained that she had inherited the house from a relative, but did not need it. Her reason for selling to Ms. Carpenter was simple: If the home were put on the local market, the lot would bring a modest sum, but traders in salvaged teak — both local buyers and foreigners like Ms. Carpenter — are willing to pay hundreds of dollars per cubic meter, or more than $50,000 for an entire house.

John Christenson for The New York Times
Looking East ~ Mark Suess, a designer for Global Surroundings, used teak floorboards from an Indonesian building and an old reliquary to decorate his Minnesota home.

Many homeowners in Southeast Asia use teak "like a bank," said Philippe Guizol, a researcher who frequently works with the Center for International Forestry Research, a conservation organization based in Indonesia. "If you need cash and you have teak in your floor, you just sell it," Mr. Guizol said.

But Ms. Carpenter says she avoids buying houses that people would otherwise continue living in, as well as historic landmarks like temples. She noted that she is required by the Thai government to process the wood — re-mill or dry it — before shipping it to the United States, so the country's resources are not being removed without an investment in local labor.

Importers point out that the wood can last another century or more, even if the shift in context is stark, said Mark Suess, a designer for Global Surroundings. In his home in St. Cloud, Minn., the pocked floorboards running from the front door to the dining room were planed smooth years earlier for use in Indonesian homes. The cabinet where his family stores cookbooks was for decades an altar and reliquary where people prayed. The result is an exchange of cultural styles, as Americans like Mr. Suess embrace an old-fashioned Asian aesthetic, while many Southeast Asians look to contemporary Western design.

Ms. Howe of Bridgehampton, who frequently travels to Southeast Asia for business, said that in the last decade the replacement of wooden structures with Western- style buildings has been obvious.

"It seems almost natural that they would be changing and updating," she said. "And then one day they'll probably want their old teak back again."