Design timber home

Featured Timber Home

Rustic Homes is fortunate that many of the timber homes we build are for people with great style and taste. As a result our wooden homes are featured in the media on occasion and we were so pleased to see one of earlier builds, the Blue House, appear in the December edition of House and…

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ArchitectureEnvironmentalIndustryTimber

The Better Living Challenge

The Better Living Challenge  called on designers, architects, residents, inventors and students to submit new or exiting products, services and systems that can be used for low-income home improvement. One of our supporters and great ambassador for forestry in South Africa, Vernon Collis, entered three proposals through his company Collis & Associates and their California…

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GovernmentThe Exit Policy

Grabouw’s forestry industry

If the Forestry Exit Strategy, that is currently ruling the management of Grabouw’s plantations, is not reversed within eighteen months, it will be too late to save the region’s 100-year old forestry industry, with the loss of 12,000 jobs. Within just eighteen months there will be so little timber to process that remaining sawmills will…

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ForestryIndustry

Saving South Africa’s Managed Forests

As a modern building material, wood offers exceptional possibilities. Its potential for engineering and infinite shapes is limitless and it shows additional benefits as one of the most environmentally sustainable building materials in the world. So said the introduction to the fourth Wood Conference held this February at the CTICC in Cape Town. Architects, engineers,…

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IndustryTimber

Timber as a sustainable resource

Trees naturally convert carbon dioxide into a light, strong and versatile building material. Trees sustain life, cool the environment, are renewable and require very little maintenance. The entire tree can be utilized, from sawn timber to chips and biomass for energy. Building with renewable timber is therefore an effective way for the construction industry to…

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ForestryIndustry

History of Forestry in SA

The early settlers used the natural building resource provided to them by the indigenous forests around the Cape. “After nearly 40 years of exploitation, Simon van der Stel realised that there was going to be a shortage of timber and one hundred young oaks were ordered to be planted on each grant of land in…

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