Rivian

Angel City Lumber collaborated with Studio 111 and RDC Collaborative to create a vibrant community hub in Venice, CA. This outdoor courtyard features durable Aleppo Pine benches, play platforms, and more, offering a welcoming space for events and gardening classes. Explore this wooden wonderland near the historic site where Ray Bradbury penned The Martian Chronicles.

Our friends at Studio 111 and RDC Collaborative understood their client’s ethos and enlisted ACL to consult on durable exterior materials to provide for their first-ever community hub in Venice, CA. The outdoor courtyard acts as a gathering space for community events and gardening classes. It’s adorned with magnificently large timber benches, slab benches, play platforms, balance beams, and stools, all from our beloved Aleppo Pine, truly a wooden wonderland.

Grab a coffee on Abbot Kinney Blvd and take a short stroll to this historic site (Ray Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles here) and be inspired as Rivian takes electrifying automobiles to the next level, designing high-range, all-wheel drive trucks & SUVs, allowing us to explore our natural world responsibly.

Rooted in the Mediterranean and Northern Africa, Aleppo Pine is known for its fine lumber, helping to build the first known civilizations. It was brought to the US in the late 1600’ as an ornamental tree. However, the Ancient Greeks held the tree tinhigher regard, using it for home and shipbuilding.. even ceremonially sacrificing an Aleppo pine to the god Attis. While we may not hold the tree in exactly the same fervor, we see the excellent outdoor applications of this wood. A resinous, hard pine, Aleppo has great resistance to pests and decay. Planter beds, fencing, timber and log benches/stools, and exterior sculptural pieces will stand the test of time. Aleppo’s sweeping resin swirls will capture your eye but are muted enough to prove elegant.

Sugar Gum, another Aussie native, was planted in the late 1800s around Southern California, and this tree, in particular, was part of Abbot Kinney’s attempt to Eucalyptize LA. Developer, conservationist, and experimental forester Kinney was never short on big ideas of how to “green” (verb) LA while incidentally creating copious amounts of timber for the nation’s encroaching timber famine. Kinney was a bigger proponent of Sugar Gum as opposed to the highly touted (rocket-growing) Blue Gum.

As the story unfolds, the silviculture, forestry, harvest, and wood seasoning of Eucalyptus in the US was too novice, and wood yields were of terrible quality. Ultimately, the process was abandoned, leaving hundreds of thousands of Eucalyptus standing along the entire California coast and, perhaps more famously, becoming an invasive tree. Fortunately, we’ve been able to honor many of these lovely Euclids with innovative drying techniques and an understanding of application sensitivity.