Hewing A Trend In Housing Log Homes Building An Upscale Following

The log cabin rests, dun and drafty, on a distant edge of the national psyche, relegated to the pioneer past of the blacksmith shop and one-room schoolhouse.

That image is ready for a renovation. Log buildings are gathering a small but growing and passionate following in the vacation havens and outlying suburbs of America. Engineering advances have allowed for bigger and fancier “log homes,” and the term cabin is rendered obsolete by three-story structures with elevators and hot tubs.

Americans particularly middle-age professionals seeking upscale simulations of rugged living are building more than 21,000 log houses each year. Although statistics are scarce, John Kupferer, editor of Log Home Living magazine, said log construction accounts for about 6 percent of all custom-built homes, compared with 4 percent in the mid-1980s.

“There’s more of an interest now than there ever has been before. Even during the settlement of the country, there are more log houses being built now than then,” said DeWelle “Skip” Ellsworth Jr., a fifth-generation log home builder in Monroe, Wash.

Log home production and construction are up all over the country, each having risen more than 10 percent from 1986 to 1995, according to a survey by Log Home Living. The number of companies making log homes more than doubled, from 235 to 480, during the same time.

Manufacturers’ revenue shot up 127 percent from 1986 to 1995, when sales of log building materials hit $883 million.

The increasing number of log homes also has helped make finance and insurance companies, once skeptical of the structures, more comfortable about working with buyers, said Sam Satterwhite of Saterwhite Log Homes in Texas.

A major reason for the boom is that log home lovers have gone upscale, said Kupferer, the magazine editor and founder of the trade group Log Homes Council.

Average owners, he said, “are college-educated, upwardly mobile professionals … who can afford to live and want to live outside the urban areas and telecommute or commute.” Nine out of 10 use log homes as their primary residences.

There are practical considerations for owning a log home, say manufacturers and owners: durability, energy efficiency and fire resistance, compared with other wood structures.

But many also have an almost spiritual love of the log look. Log architecture has succeeded by appealing to a pioneer aesthetic, even as it evolved from small cabin to spacious dwelling.

It is these roomy log homes that are sprouting by the thousands across the country. The average size of a new one is about 2,200 square feet, the average cost about $150,000, Kupferer said.

They can be much grander. One complex outside Dallas features an 8,000-square-foot main house, a 3,500-square-foot guest house and a 20,000-square-foot barn all log. Satterwhite said his company is working on a $2 million, 6,500-square-foot log house in Cleburne, Texas, with “a lot of Italian tile and very exotic wall coverings.”

Industry growth can be traced to the development of kit log homes in the 1970s, which include cut, milled logs for easier assembly. Construction techniques that make log homes more energy efficient and architecturally flexible also helped.