Timber House

“Everything in the house — cabinets, baseboards, doors, trim, timbers, beams — is solid white oak. We used clear cypress on the ceiling just to give a little contrast in color.“
— Mike Hollaway

Timber House sits on a ranch on a slight ridge in the Hill Country — a build brought to Mike Hollaway Custom Homes by an architect designer for a couple who grew up in Michigan with traditional timber-frame homes and spent years looking for the right Texas property to build their own. The home is 100% timber-framed: every connection is mortise-and-tenon, executed without nails, screws, or bolts, with the load carried through interlocking wood joinery shaped by computer-routed precision and centuries-old technique.

White oak runs through the entire home — cabinets, baseboards, doors, trim, timbers, and beams — with clear cypress used on the ceilings to deliver a slight color contrast. The main living area carries forty-foot ceilings. The roof system is a SIPs (structural insulated panel) installation that drives the home to an unusually high level of energy efficiency for a structure of this scale. Throughout the home, true masonry fireplaces — a rarity in this part of Texas — anchor the principal rooms.

The home is also designed for self-sufficiency at a level rarely seen in residential construction. It carries a true basement (itself unusual in Hill Country soil), which doubles as a safe room with poured concrete walls and ceiling, separate HVAC, its own power plant, separate propane and water, a hidden rear staircase to the outside, and an exterior fresh-air intake. Sections of the home use bullet-resistant glass, Kevlar wall panels, and steel doors rated for impacts up to .50 caliber. A whole-house backup generator pairs with a discreet, distance-sited solar field — placed out of view from the house at the owners’ request — to keep operations running through any interruption.

The build is a study in sequencing. Timber Houses don’t get framed the way conventional Texas homes do. Embed plates were set in the foundation at every column load point because so much of the structural load travels through the outside beams. Two Texas suppliers fabricated the beams to mortise-and-tenon specifications — some assembled flat on the ground and lifted into place, others built up vertically because of their size.

To protect the beams once they were raised, the team installed clear cypress tongue-and-groove directly to the timber, then layered plywood, foam insulation, and another layer of plywood to form the deck, dried in the structure, and put the roof on it. This sequence preserved the wood through weather while the SIPs roof system was completed above.

Inside, every light in the home — from the kitchen and hallways to the great room — is monitored and controlled remotely through panels and phone, and music is wired into every room. The lighting installation in the timber beams alone consumed an unusual amount of time: drilling through the beams to hide all wiring meant that the upstairs balcony overlooking the great room could read clean from above, with no exposed conduit running across the trusses.

Timber House is one of the most distinctive timber-frame residences ever built by Mike Hollaway Custom Homes — 100% mortise-and-tenon, executed at a scale (40-foot great-room ceilings, 7,000+ square feet of conditioned space) that few builders attempt in Texas. Its combination of traditional joinery, SIPs roof system, true basement safe room, and discreet off-grid capability puts it in a category of one within the firm’s portfolio.