Riverbend Timber Frame Homes Featured in Magazines

Nearing retirement age, Randy and Cathy Clement began dreaming of building a small Craftsman-style timber-frame home somewhere in the mountains where they could spend leisurely days golfing, mountain biking and hiking.

Everyone has his or her own needs when designing a house. But when Ed and Deb Dick designed and built their timber-frame home in northwest Ohio, their needs were more specific than most.

After 30 years of living in the Los Angeles area, the large-city lifestyle was getting to be more of a bother than it was worth. My wife Mary and I are avid fly fishermen, so during our many trips to Colorado, our thoughts shifted to giving up the city life and moving to the country.

This is the story of how a dearly loved lakeside cottage that had been in a family for years gave way to a modern timber frame-home. The owners no longer mourn the loss but celebrate what they’ve gained.

Moving from a 19th-century Victorian house to a contemporary timber-frame home transported Brad and Lou Ann Miller to a whole new way of life. Accustomed to confined and formal, the western Pennsylvania couple found themselves embracing wide-open spaces, inside and outside the home.

A timber home was not in the cards when Dr. Warren Wolfe and his wife, Diane, decided to sell their New Jersey home of more than 30 years and head south to live closer to their children and grandchildren. The original plan? To buy a resale house in one of Washington, D.C.’s quiet suburbs.

Bob Burnside doesn’t cut corners, a fact that can be either incredibly helpful or impossibly annoying to a homebuilder. No matter. Bob refers to his building style as MBWA, or Management By Walking Around. “I watch what people are doing, and I ask a lot of questions, which helps everybody pay more attention and do their jobs more thoroughly,” says Bob.

When Detroit architect Bob Formisano came up with the idea for his family’s second home, he knew just who to turn to. He’d been working with Stewart Elliott, Sales Manager for Riverbend Timber Framing, for two years on his company home-cost.com that develops a software program to help determine the cost of building a custom home.

Paul and Suzanne ZumFelde’s new timber home is truly a family place. It sits on 67 acres of Ohio farmland that have been in the family since 1905. It was designed in part by Paul and his brother, California architect Dale ZumFelde, then modified by Fred Friar, a designer with Riverbend Timber Framing, the company for which Paul works as a sales representative.

After a fire devastates their 18th-century home a Long Island couple builds anew and maintains the historic character of their original house.

When Bob Burnside moved near Ann Arbor, Michigan, a few years ago, the home-construction veteran wanted to announce his arrival in a big way. So he did what any savvy builder would do – construct a spectacular timber home that would act as his calling-card for potential clients.

Even after she was grown and had made a home in Alexandria Virginia, with her husband Ad, Jill Eichner’s childhood ties to a lake in northern Michigan tugged at her heart.

Dale and Brigitte Stevens love to fly. In fact they own their own plane – a Maule MX7. The couple flies so much that when they were looking for property to build a dream home, one of their requirements was that any acreage they found had to have a strip of land long enough and flat enough to become a runway.

What to do when unannounced guests drop by for dinner? No worries, mate, when your cabin is a Queenslander. Simply toss more shrimp on the Barbie and kick back on the veranda.

Clear Lake, near Fremont, Indiana, is a special place for both Mike Franz and Jim Balmer. Both men spent part of their childhood at the lake, although they never met as kids. Had Mike and his wife Pat not decided to build a summer cottage on the lake, they might never have known each other.

Sometimes you have to listen to your heart. Liana Smith lived in very historic, very traditional Leesburg, Virginia. Even though the Blue Ridge Mountains were in her back yard, her heart heard the Siren's song of majestic peaks, deep canyons and the wide - open spaces of cowboy country. She dreamed of high - tailing it to the Rockies.

"After I've been away for a few days, I love coming home to the familiar scent of wood", says Tom Dillon, describing what it's like walking into the timber frame home he shares with his wife Dee.

Mary Ann and Mallary Mason began planning their three-bedroom southern Ohio timber frame home with a vision. "Our vision of the house was to enhance the beauty of the area in which we located it." Says Mary Ann of their plans for reclaiming an old farm that had become extremely overgrown.