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Timber Log Buildings - A brief history

Architects, engineers, town planners are only now beginning to discover what Ritsu have known for the last 30
years as a designer and manufacturer of timber log buildings, timber is the most balanced solution, at least to a
part of our construction and housing problem.

Ritsu started life as a manufacturer of timber log cabins, in Estonia, timber log buildings have been used for
centuries as homes and summer houses, in fact amongst the earliest buildings archaeologists have ever found
are timber log buildings dating back to 3,500 B.C.

Most of us associate the log cabin with early settlement in North America but this was borrowed technology
making equal use of a widely available material grown in a similar climate to their “ancestral” home in what is now
Russia, Sweden, Norway and the Baltic States (amongst others).

Most modern Nordic nations were extensively forested, in colder climes, trees here grow slowly and straight,
making them the perfect building material. Timber could be felled with simple tools with relative ease and little
labour, crafted into rudimentary homes protecting the occupants from the worst of the weather. The weight of the
logs helped to seal gaps as a result of their own dead loads, and any remaining gaps filled with chips and
whatever suitable material could be found locally. Later, cabins might have been clad with roughly cut timber
planks to provide better protection from the elements.

The first homes were most likely transportable, using nails made no sense as when the logs settled they would
either rip the nails out or render them useless - instead logs were cut using simple joints with overlapping ends to
the corners and internal wall, creating the familiar “castellated” corners and simple timber dowel joints.

Our modern cabins and log buildings still use these same basic methods of construction, tweaked of course to
make use of modern design and manufacturing techniques - still no nails though!

Figure 2. A clad timber log cabin