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From Curbside to Centerpiece
How an LA-based company, Angel City Lumber, is upcycling LA’s street trees into forward-thinking design.
by Thea Rose Lemberger
The hardwood industry has always been defined not only by what the forest provides, but also by the many hands that transform each tree into the products found in our homes and built environments. Traditionally, that forest meant a managed stand, a prized possession, a distant mill, and a key component of an efficient supply chain. The gorgeous, precious, adorned wooden pieces in our lives were a testament to the noble stewards of the forests where those trees grew. All of us as consumers have benefited from the generational knowledge of forest stewardship and from the people throughout the supply chain who carry that resource forward. The design and construction industries have also benefited from the knowledge, labor, and vision of those who care for our forests and produce wood with exceptional quality and care.
That tradition of stewardship has not disappeared; it has expanded.
In recent years, as cities have expanded and urban trees have matured, the work of caring for and recovering hardwood resources is no longer confined to deep-woods forestry. Many American cities now have robust urban forests, including large, mature trees planted decades ago that support ecosystems and require active management. That management falls to arborists and urban forestry professionals who assess which urban trees stay standing and which come down. Those removals — driven by disease, safety hazards, or decline — create a new extension of the hardwood supply: urban timber. Yet many of these species have never been widely incorporated into the industry: established practices for milling, grading, and specifying them at scale are still developing. Los Angeles is where this expansion is already underway. Isabel House is a project that aimed to create a prototype of an affordable, climate- responsive home in Northeast Los Angeles. Developer Michael Tessler of Responsive Homes, working with architects Utopiad and Daveed Kapoor, started on a simple premise: renewable, locally sourced materials should come first wherever possible. To honor that premise, the design team needed a mill willing to work the way they wanted to build — and found Angel City Lumber (ACL). Founded by Jeff Perry, the LA mill sources every log it processes from trees felled within Los Angeles County, salvaging fallen city trees that would otherwise go to waste. For Isabel House, ACL became more than a lumber supplier; the company worked closely with the architects and builders to understand the design intent, fabricated custom tongue-and-groove flooring and door casings, and milled each log to maximize both performance and visual character. That collaboration pushed the build toward two species almost no one specifies in design and construction: California Sycamore (Platanus racemosa) and Shamel Ash (Fraxinus uhdei) — both sourced from trees that grew near the LA Sports Arena, creating a tangible connection between the home’s materials and their local origin.
Where these species do show up in the industry, it’s typically in narrow, niche, decorative roles: Shamel Ash is typically made into veneer sheets or tool handles and kitchen utensils; Sycamore, when it appears at all, is almost always American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) quartersawn for its flecked lacewood figure and used sparingly in cabinetry or trim. California sycamores (Platanus racemosa) are native to the West Coast, featuring deeply lobed leaves and twisting, multi-trunk growth, while American sycamores (Platanus occidentalis) hail from the Eastern US, growing larger with wider, straighter trunks. California Sycamore is virtually absent from commercial lumber markets — production mills reject its irregular, sweeping logs — but that same twisting growth yields dramatic figure and grain patterns its Eastern cousin doesn’t typically produce, making it an artisan wood ideally suited to urban mills like ACL that can read each log individually and mill for character rather than volume. ACL’s work goes beyond standard salvage. Most of what comes through its mill consists of trees taken down by storms, disease, pests, and development. In addition, ACL partners with the U.S. Forest Service to salvage dead and fire-damaged trees from the wildland-urban interface and the Angeles National Forest.
What ACL does with that material is best described as upcycling rather than simple reuse: instead of grinding a fallen tree down into mulch or wood chips, a lower-value, generic outcome, they
turn it into dimensional lumber that carries the tree’s own name, origin, and character into a floor, a piece of furniture, or a building. That ethos -honoring what a fallen tree still has to offer
rather than letting it go to waste- runs through everything ACL does. Through their exploration and
experimentation with urban trees — finding new ways to use hardwood — ACL projects allow design teams to take creative license to a whole new level.
For the R1 and Isabel House project, ACL milled tongue-and-groove Shamel Ash flooring from a tree that had grown in downtown Los Angeles and incorporated California Sycamore elsewhere in the build. Urban timber lacks the uniformity of commercial lumber. Still, it has its own distinct identity—each board on the R1 and Isabel House floors boasted unpredictable shifts in hue, rich grain variations, and singular character marks. This inherent variation is exactly where the design team’s creative license came alive. Rather than fighting the irregularities, they embraced them, treating the open floor plan as a canvas and the installation as an intricate puzzle. The team worked painstakingly, piece by piece, curating the placement of each board to balance the contrasting colors and textures into a cohesive, flowing masterpiece. In doing so, the floor became the undeniable centerpiece of the home, and the team effectively wrote the first chapter on how this species can be artistically realized in an interior. Every architect who specifies Shamel Ash flooring after them will be building on a template that didn’t exist a few years ago. ACL’s success hasn’t come without trial and error. Learning how unfamiliar urban species dry, mill, and perform in finished products often means discovering their limitations firsthand. On one commission, a furniture maker attempted to recreate a classic Black Walnut stool using locally milled eucalyptus, but the wood proved too unstable for the design, cracking during production. The lesson wasn’t that the wood had failed—it was that every species has unique characteristics that require different design and manufacturing approaches. That hard-won knowledge is what ACL brings to each new project, helping designers understand a material’s strengths and adapt their designs accordingly.
That experience also shapes how ACL works with design teams. Perry says one of the biggest challenges is managing the expectation gap — the distance between what designers envision and what a particular species, with its unique yield, appearance, and natural variation, can realistically deliver. Industrial supply chains have conditioned the design world to expect uniformity: consistent grain, tone, and hue, with minimal defects, because those qualities can be achieved at scale. Urban hardwood tells a different story. “If there is wood that appears consistent as far as grain, tone, hue, no knot, no degradation, we can do that as humans in an industrial setting,” Perry says. “But where ACL runs up against design perceptions and expectations is when we say, this is from one or two trees. The yield is the yield.” Rather than a limitation, Perry sees this as an opportunity to approach material specification differently, designing around the character and availability of each tree rather than expecting a standardized product.
ACL doesn’t guarantee a catalog-style supply of a given wood; availability depends on which trees are removed and when, on nature’s schedule rather than a purchase order. Instead, designers must approach each project individually, designing around the unique characteristics and availability of a specific tree rather than ordering a uniform SKU. While this approach requires greater flexibility, it also creates unique design opportunities.
Every job features material that can never be replicated—like a floor or a table with a one-of-a-kind grain. Scarcity, reframed, is exclusivity.
While ACL is an LA company, this isn’t an LA-only story. Nearly every American city is sitting on an urban forest full of hardwood species that have never been milled at any real scale. In Baltimore, the city-managed Camp Small Zero Waste Initiative has transformed thousands of tons of public street and park tree debris into usable lumber, furniture, and architectural elements; in Minneapolis, the boutique mill Wood from the Hood is reclaiming removed neighborhood trees and tracking every single piece of handcrafted lumber back to its original zip code. In Sacramento, the nonprofit Urban Wood Rescue has partnered with national retailers like Room & Board to design high-end furniture lines using salvaged neighborhood redwoods; in Ann Arbor, the public-private partnership with Urban Ashes has spearheaded an initiative to salvage trees felled by school construction and mill them into architectural elements for new campus buildings; in Corvallis, the city’s Urban Lumber Salvage program is milling local street-tree removals and selling the boards through a local hardwood center to fund municipal replanting efforts directly. A small but growing number of mills across the country — some affiliated with the nonprofit Urban Wood Network, others independently salvaging street-tree removals — are only beginning to treat that resource as lumber rather than waste.
But the interpretive work a designer does — deciding what a board can become — isn’t where the story starts. It’s where it ends. That same act of interpretation happens far earlier in the process than most designers ever see, long before a board exists at all. During its 2024 webinar on urban wood, the National Hardwood Lumber Association (NHLA), which has established the hardwood industry’s grading standards for more than a century, identified “bucking”— the process of deciding where and how to cut a log before milling — as the single most important factor in determining the value of an urban wood log. Perry describes the same principle at work on ACL’s own mill floor: “We have quality control, we certainly do. A lot doesn’t make the cut. But what makes the cut, there’s room for interpretation and creativity and intentionality on the mill side.” That’s not a sorting task; it’s an interpretive one: someone has to look at an irregular, one-of-a-kind log and decide, before any board exists, what it’s capable of becoming. NHLA is effectively teaching the industry to treat variability as a design problem to solve rather than a defect to grade out, the same muscle the Isabel House team exercised on the floor. Bucking decides what a board can become before it leaves the mill; laying that floor decides what it would mean once it arrives at the building. Same interpretive act, performed by different hands at different points in the life of a tree turned wood product.
Knowing a species’ backstory isn’t the same as knowing how to work with it. Shamel Ash and California Sycamore each ask something different of a design team — and each offers something back you won’t find on a supplier’s shelf. Neither reveals itself until you’ve spent real time with the wood. Consider Shamel Ash. To the arborists who manage city trees, it’s often considered a challenging species. Shamel Ash grows quickly, developing a large tree, but that rapid growth comes with aggressive roots that lift sidewalks, damage infrastructure, and compete with limited soil space. As cities manage and diversify their urban forests, many of these fast-growing trees are removed — creating an unexpected opportunity to recover a hardwood species with untapped design potential.
We consume enormous amounts of commercial lumber, yet have no established supply chain for the heavy, workable hardwoods standing in our own urban neighborhoods. Turning a notorious urban “troublemaker” into dimensional lumber does two things at once — it clears a headache for the city and captures a resource that would otherwise be mulched. And the material rewards the effort.
ACL describes Shamel Ash as a dream wood: machinable, workable, joinable, and sandable, bone-white and monochromatic with a swooping grain that stands apart from darker species, suited to both indoor and outdoor use. For a designer, that bone-white field reads like a blank canvas rather than a busy one — it holds a room’s light instead of competing with it: a natural fit for expansive flooring, feature walls, or built-in casework where you want brightness and continuity. Its indoor-outdoor durability means one species can carry a project from an interior floor to an exterior bench without switching palettes.
The California Sycamore offers different challenges and rewards. Its wood is tough, coarse-grained, and famously hard to split and work — stubborn enough that it was long a favorite for butcher blocks. By ACL’s account, perfecting the art of the California Sycamore comes down to the drying process: prone to collapse and warping, it demands meticulous stickering and stacking in a dehumidification kiln; skip that precision, and it turns temperamental. Get it right, and it gives some of the most dramatically figured grain and richest color ACL mills. Much like Maple, California Sycamore has mostly white to light-tan sapwood, with darker reddish-brown heartwood streaks running through most boards. Quartersawn, it reveals distinct ray flecks that give the surface a freckled, spotted character. For a designer, that makes it a statement material, not a background one — the focal point of a room, the tabletop or feature panel you specify when the
grain is meant to be the whole point.
There’s a real invitation hiding inside ACL’s model: staying open to which species and applications are possible doesn’t just widen a designer’s palette; it gives a city’s overlooked resource a second life instead of a trip to the wood chipper.
That’s the difference between recycling a tree and upcycling one — recycling erases what made it unique; upcycling carries its story forward.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thea Rose Lemberger is an environmental journalist and practicing arborist with a
master’s degree in environmental science and forest health, grounded in forest restoration,
ecology, and sustainable supply chains. A former collegiate and professional basketball
player, she traded competitive sport for a second career devoted to the natural world.
