About Us

At Angel City Lumber, we honor our community trees by stewarding the wood they leave behind and building with their final gift and legacy. Whether that wood becomes an architectural centerpiece or a simple broom handle is secondary—the value lies in the act of honoring. Regardless of form, these offerings must be acknowledged, considered, cherished, and never taken for granted. From a tree’s germination to the moment its wood is worked by hand, our process is rooted in reverence, participation, and reciprocity.

Angel City Lumber's lumber manufacturing process is a set of fully integrated and fully transparent steps that facilitate the conversion of fallen trees into lumber and beyond.

This process begins with sourcing logs from fallen trees in residential, municipal, and national forests within Los Angeles County. Each log that comes into the Angel City Log Deck receives an alphanumeric code denoting the LA neighborhood or city where the tree stood, the species, and the harvest date. This information stays with the tree throughout the entire manufacturing process so that upon purchase, everyone is privy to the tree's origin story.

The Angel City Lumber business model is to eclipse itself over time. We are a bridge to better forest management, a thumb in the dam. Decades from now, Los Angeles forest management and lumber will be so localized that there will be no need for a centralized, industrialized facility to supply lumber to Los Angeles. In the future, each zip code will have its own coppice woodlot, managed by its community members, to supply lumber to its neighborhood. Community members will go to the woodlot to see the trees from which their lumber comes. This truly regenerative, participatory way of working with our trees will intimately connect the community members (human and more-than-human) with their trees.