Isabel House

Angel City Lumber contributed to the R1 and Isabel House project by providing Shamel Ash flooring from a tree in Downtown LA. This affordable, climate-responsive home prototype highlights how urban lumber can reduce waste and create a meaningful connection between materials and their users.

Michael Tessler, a building developer deeply committed to sustainable design and construction, created a prototype for a small, affordable, climate-responsive home in Los Angeles.

R1 and the Isabel House, made with renewable materials and designed for passive heating and cooling, is the future of a conscientious, ecologically-minded building. We fabricated tongue and groove flooring from a Shamel Ash tree that grew in Downtown Los Angeles. Urban Lumber plays a leading role in lowering construction’s carbon footprint, minimizing waste, and creating a tangible connection between product and user. This project perfectly represents the benefits Angel City Lumber hopes to bring to our region through the reuse of one of Los Angeles’s most overlooked resources—its trees.

Shamel Ash is a dream wood. It’s machinable, workable, joinable, and sandable. Its monochromatic bone color and swooping grain give great contrast to its darker wood tone counterparts. It is bone-white and monochromatic in color, offering a nice alternative to dramatic heartwood/sapwood variation. It is excellent for both outdoor and indoor applications and is also atypical to commercial Ash species.

It is also misunderstood. People shun the Shamel Ash because it is invasive to Southern California. It grows quickly, spreads canopy, and produces amazing lumber, and because we have let it stray from cultivation, it threatens other flora. We think people need to take some responsibility. The trees are only doing what they know how to do.