About 2 years ago, I got an interesting call. Bob Smith (that really is his name, even though it sounds like a witness relocation name) called me from General Motors. He said that he is overseeing a new battery plant for Ultium, a GM partnership, and he wanted my help. He saw that we like to save trees and repurpose them into floors, furniture and wall accents, and he tapped Good Wood Nashville to do just that with the trees that had to come down from the construction site.
Ultium is a partnership by General Motors and LG.
I met Bob out there, as well as Alonso Smith, and the fine folks at Barton Mallow, their GC Partner. I brought arborists with me as we discussed which trees had to go down, and how we could save them. Even more important, we brainstormed how to put them back into the project as statement pieces: Wood Accents that tell the story of net zero, and our attempt to capture the carbon of the trees and put it to great use!
They helped saved the trees from the field used for the new battery plant!
We got on the phone with Speranta, the interior Designer for GM, as well as the team at Gresham Smith. We all brainstormed what we could do. We knew that Utlium would need tables, conference tables, and other pieces of furniture. We assumed that they would have some areas where we could put some accent walls, and we dreamed up some fun ways to place them all around the project.
However, the trees set the storyline. What we could build was determined by what type of trees were there, and what species, etc. As it turned out ,many of these old trees out in the middle of the farmland were Hackberry!
We’ve never seen grain this pretty!
Hackberry is not a common lumber used in furniture, and many think of it as a waste: a simple city tree, or a fence line tree that grows up like a weed. We didn’t know what kind of grain we would see in these trees, but we had to save them. One main trunk that we saved of them was the size of a Chevy Volt! Just the one log!
Look at that grain!!!! We can’t wait to install all of this in the new Ultium Plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee.