A beautiful old barn built in 1865 sits on Robert Foulkes’ property in Suttons Bay. And he built it … the second time around.

Foulkes is a timber frame builder and owner of White Oak Timber Frames. His company cuts new house frames as well as restores old barn frames, church steeples and anything else built of heavy timber. The work comes from a love and a respect for honest, simple buildings.

Foulkes first started his timber framing business in Ann Arbor. He moved himself and the business to his 40 acres near Suttons Bay nearly 30 years ago.

The heavy timber construction uses mortise and tenon joints – a simple and strong process woodworkers have used for thousands of years to join pieces of wood. White oak is the strongest, heaviest and most rot resistant of all the oaks, and the choice of European timber framers for centuries.

But with the rise of sawmills and white pine forests in Michigan, construction of timber frame structures fell off, Foulkes says; stud or stick built homes became the norm. It wasn’t until the 1970s that timber frame construction – based on the idea of using a tree in the most efficient manner possible – was revived in this country.

So who’s building timber frame homes these days? Virtually no one, says Foulkes.

“Normally, we’re booked a year and a half in advance, but we haven’t built a new house in two years,” he says. “So, what are we doing now? We’re recycling whole buildings.”

Here are a few things he’s done: fabricated a new home from timber that was from the former Frigid Foods fruit processing plant, built in 1920, in Suttons Bay. He has moved barns and turned them into wineries (or winery additions, in the case of L. Mawby and Boskydel), houses, and even new barns. He’s even used old timber from a factory to build a new factory in Ireland, where he lives part of the year.

“People who want a historical building and want to do business in a space that’s cheap have kept us going,” says Foulkes, though he declined to offer any ballpark costs because, he says, so many variables come into play.

He also sees the burgeoning community-supported agriculture industry as another new way to repurpose these old structures.

The 19th-century barn on Foulkes’ property came from a farmer a mile down the road. The farmer no longer needed it, so he called Foulkes. The barn was disassembled, fixed up and then Foulkes raised the barn on his own land.

“This is the VW Bug of timber frame barns,” says Foulkes. “It’s a three-bay English barn, [the style] that you can still see in England, but built in 1350.”

“Ninety-five percent of it is the original building,” he adds. “Just amazingly clean design.”