A Passion for Innovation and Sustainability

Photo credit: urbantimber.ca

EcoPoxy recently got the opportunity to chat with Darren Cunningham, the visionary woodworker and entrepreneur behind Urban Timber Reclaimed Wood Co. With a passion for transforming salvaged wood into stunning pieces of functional art, Cunningham has carved out a unique niche in the Canadian woodworking space. As the co-founder of Edmonton's renowned Urban Timber, he seamlessly blends his love for sustainability with a keen instinct for spotting new trends; creating not only beautiful pieces of furniture but also a thriving business. Here are the highlights from our conversation!

Photo credit: urbantimber.ca

Q: What inspired you to start Urban Timber, I understand it was a bit of a family affair. What’s that journey been like, building your business?

A: Urban Timber started about 13 years ago as a family business. My dad and I were building furniture out of our other shop at home. We were one of the first to go to market at that time with reclaimed wood furniture. Basically, we just started off very organically; grass roots. I'd always done woodworking my whole life, building tables for friends and family, and there was really no one else doing this style of furniture at that time. So, we just exploded within a year.

Photo credit: urbantimber.ca

My mom and dad were involved in the business early on. My mom had Alzheimer's and has since passed, and my dad has retired from the business. But we do something that's kind of cool with the Alzheimer's Society. We've raised a bunch of money through our dining room table sales for Alzheimer's. We continue to do that through our “Wood To Remember” fund. So that gives you a little background on my family and how we got started.

Photo credit: urbantimber.ca

We actually ended up opening a storefront, within about a year and a half of officially starting our business, in Edmonton. But we were doing a lot of our millwork in Lethbridge at the time; that's where my dad is living. We officially moved everything to Edmonton in 2018, and we've been a shop and store together since then.

Our passion is to try to be somewhat first to market with new ideas, and on the creative side of things, to be innovators doing things a bit differently. We've done that with reclaimed materials and we've also done that with epoxy and with your [EcoPoxy] products.

Q: There are other makers in this space now; what’s your process for differentiating Urban Timber and keeping your projects unique?

A: Yeah, I think it's just the evolution of what the client is looking for. The reclaimed style was very popular - it still is. I think we still do a number of really unique reclaimed pieces, like using reclaimed boxcar [floor plank] material that we get out of the US, and we're the only ones to do that.

 
Photo credit: urbantimber.ca

We actually started using EcoPoxy to flood those [boxcar floor plank] tables. We wanted to add stability to both sides of the table. Also with the boxcar material, there's a ton of scratches and markings; really deep grooves from all the pallet jacks and forklifts, and we wanted to keep those in the wood. But we didn't want the wood to be rough, because we use it for bar tops and countertops, so we use EcoPoxy to flood the tops of the tables and to keep that character. The more we did that, the more our clients were coming back and asking, “Is there anything that's got deeper gouges or a piece missing?” Because, we can use clear EcoPoxy to fill that gap.

  
Photo credit: urbantimber.ca

And then we started working a lot more with the [EcoPoxy] products; on river tables. We started making those pours, and we were just kind of fooling around with it a bit, maybe six years ago. But again, we wanted to try to be a bit different, so we really started focusing on different design elements and doing a lot of roundtables, which a lot of people weren’t doing at that time; incorporating rocks into the tables. So yeah, that's kind of how we evolved.

Photo credit: urbantimber.ca

Q: So that brings us nicely to the stunning three-piece round table you created for a Saskatchewan first nation. What brought that project about, and what was the inspiration for the final design; which included Manitoba maple, encapsulated river stones, and custom steel legs?

A: Well, I grew up in Saskatchewan, and I've got a very good high school friend, Jay Sullivan, who owns a company called HBI Office Plus in Regina, and they do “outside the box” office furnishings solutions. He said the First Nation wanted a communal table and asked if this was something we'd be interested in, and of course, we said yes. But the really cool part about doing that table was that the chief and council gave us full creative control on how that table was going to look.

That doesn't happen very often with a project this size. They saw samples of our work and they were excited for us just to come up with something really cool. So, we had some beautiful Manitoba maple and we wanted to use some of the little river rocks, just looking to use some natural elements from that area; that was something that was important for us to incorporate.

  
Photo credit: urbantimber.ca

Getting down to the design of it, we just sat down with pen and paper and went through 100 different ways we could do it. We had to keep in mind the weight of the table; it was going to be massive. Each one of those three sections was about 350 pounds. We really had to be conscious of how we were going to transport it from Edmonton to Peepeekisis Cree Nation in the winter, on a flat deck trailer. So, we cut it into three parts. We were able to CNC the table and all the joints. We had to be very careful about the placement of the rocks, and the depth of the epoxy so that when we were cutting all of our joints, we weren’t cutting into the rocks themselves.

Then, the inspiration for the base is a teepee design. We do all our own custom metal fabrication, so we built that in-house. That base is about 300 pounds, so I think the table came in around 1500 or 1600 pounds. It was quite the undertaking to get it moved inside.

Photo credit: urbantimber.ca

Q: So why EcoPoxy?

A: There's never a question about what we should use. On a project that size, and when we have one shot to do it, I have to use the best product available, and we strongly believe that EcoPoxy is the best product on the market.

It mixes well, it pours well. You get minimal bubbles from it. It cures the same every time. So, you know, on major legacy projects, there's no question that we're going to use the best. 

Many thanks again to Darren Cunningham for taking the time to speak with us. Be sure to visit the folks at Urban Timber the next time you’re in Edmonton. If you can’t get there in person, do the next best thing and visit them online at urbantimber.ca, or check them out on Instagram (@urbantimber_ca).