A lesser travelled path: an architect’s journey through timber-framing

Allies Farmhouse – this and other photos – unless otherwise stated – Cameron Scott

On discovering timber framing, architect Cameron Scott turned his back on a conventional career, joining Carpenter Oak & Woodland early on, before returning to refine a thorough-going sustainable architectural ethos and sensibility, one still radically at odds with the current mainstream.

“The word ‘architect’ was quite a dirty word among carpenters,” recalls Devon-based architect Cameron Scott, quite some way into one of our later phone conversations regarding working at Carpenter Oak & Woodland (COW). As an architect, Scott was an anomaly at the pioneering timber framing company, and as a carpenter, an anomaly amongst architects; an architect who had not only trained but worked as a carpenter. He could therefore pass as either – or both. Indeed, Scott was apparently initially so enthusiastic that he had to be reminded to stop and down tools over lunch and take breaks. 

Scott’s tenure at COW, first at Colerne, their Wiltshire yard near Chippenham, and then as part of the team that headed west to set up the Devon Cornsworthy Yard, is an illustration of just how different the hands-on green building culture embodied by the nascent timber frame scene was to the emerging green architectural firmament that was beginning to coalesce at the same time.

Not that Scott stayed still. At COW through its early nineties years, towards the end of his time there he’d swapped the framers outdoor life for the studio as a jobbing architect and then put in several years at COW’s partner company, Roderick James Architecture (RJA) before stepping out on his own and setting up his small practice. While Scott has developed and refined his architectural thinking through the intervening decades, what is clear is that at the root of his design ethos is the very different tradition of green oak framing. Unlike the overwhelming majority of architects, Scott’s up close and personal familiarity with carpentry, with wood and with hands on experience with a palette of materials, is at the source of his ecological architecture based on experience and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. Not only this, but it’s brought the kind of respect from fellow carpenters that they are loathe to afford almost all his professional peers.

Raising the Monimail Glasgow Flower Festival frame, Jon Broome and Cindy Harris, far left – photo Cameron Scott

The AJ Compagnons feature, from March 1992

How and why did Scott find himself on this lesser travelled path? Why did he leave it, or to what extent did he? And what does he make of the path now? It’s a story of several chapters, and which, for the mid-fifties Scott, is hardly coming to a close.

By the time he arrived at COW in autumn 1992, Scott had already been through a mind shift regarding how he thought about architecture. As a student at Brighton, frustrations were beginning to impinge. An ongoing promise over the three years to visit a building site and pick up a hammer or saw never materialised. “I walked away from Brighton with a 1st class honours degree, but I had absolutely no idea about how buildings went together.” While friends were getting lowly starter jobs at the likes of Hopkins, Fosters, and Rogers, Scott wasn’t at all sure about his first steps. But he then he volunteered on the Monimail Tower project, part of Glasgow’s 1988 Garden Festival. There he met Pat Borer, Cindy Harris and Architype co-founder Jon Broome, all long-term architect builders involved in the established eco-centre in West Wales, the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT.) Soon he had signed up, again as a volunteer, and began helping all three on timber projects, particularly the Segal Build approach. Something began to jell. Looking back, he says how “I didn’t realise I was asking such stupid questions. I just didn’t have a clue. The questions I asked were an indication of how little I knew. But then I began to learn.” CAT, Scott recalls, was very hands on. Borer, Broome, and Harris all built the buildings they’d drawn and designed. He’d also heard about Hooke Park and its radical ABK Architects roundwood buildings, and soon ran into a young carpenter and framer, Henry Russell. “There was” he’d realised, “this family of people and practices.” It also dawned on him that, step by step, he was becoming part of it.

It was Russell who told him about another branch of this family tree. Carpenter Oak & Woodland, and its founder, the late Charley Brentnall. A path back into a radical hands-on had begun to open up. Studying for a Part 2 architecture masters could have fused his sustainability interests with timber design. He may have even got a job with COW or conservation timber frame specialists, Peter McCurdy & Co, who were involved in the Globe Theatre reconstruction. But his choice of Canterbury Architecture School, essentially to get a piece of paper, turned into a damp squib. “It was just jumping through hoops, it wasn’t a time of learning,” and disillusioned, he pulled early out of the course.

Just as one door closed, another opened. Scott came across an Architectural Journal piece on timber framing, referencing a rather different educational path which sounded appealing; a timber frame course with one of the old continental guild carpentry and craft schools, Les Compagnons du Tour de France.

As things stood, there were limits to what he could bring to the table of a carpentry outfit like COW. “I could use a rotring pen,” he smiles recollecting. If he had had practical skills, though, then that would have been a different matter.  After a summer travelling round France, he headed to Toulouse, South Eastern France, for a year of timber framing and other crafts (stone masonry, slate working and brick masonry). The projects there were bigger. They were also real. There were large and well-equipped workshops with carpenters working on exteriors and interiors, such as staircases. “I was totally immersed in it, it was great.” Though not abstractly intellectual, the training was half theory and half practical, with evening classes learning planar geometry, the geometry used by timber framers. A salutary experience, today Scott says he learnt a wealth of first-hand and hands-on knowledge at the Compagnons. He knew what he was going to do when he arrived back in Britain. “I got on the phone straightaway to Charley, and Peter McCurdy.” Peter McCurdy & Co as it happened, weren’t taking people on. So COW it was. “The planar geometry was really helpful, it got me the job.”

He began by volunteering for a frame raise, staying on with Henry Russell, before work and a job materialised later in the year.  Soon enough, he made his way to Colerne, COW’s first yard in Wiltshire, which was busy with framing and carpentry. But it was also not completely recognisable to Scott. “People were working differently to how I’d worked in France, they were scribing from timber to timber, typically using spirit levels and tape measures, in contrast to the French way working off 1:1 drawings on the floor and positioning or scribing timbers over this using a plumb bob. It was a fresh experience and I was learning new skills.” His familiarity with planar – or Euclidean – geometry, also immediately proved useful, helping to join irregular pieces of timber to each other. Hailing from medieval era, the approach predates precise measurement of the pieces of timber, the geometry was direct.  “I actually liked it. The meaning of it and its application,” Scott adds.

It helped that Paul Kirkup, one of the early COW team, was half-French. “What I’d learnt complemented Paul’s work and slowly some of these French methods took hold in the workshop.” Stephan Roux, a French trained carpenter also joined, and in time a series of compagnons passed through as journeymen.  Gradually quite a bit of French knowledge and techniques were picked up and integrated. “It was very romantic compared to the French carpenters. The physical carpentry was also different, cutting the timber with axes. “The early days of COW were more about trying to figure out how to frame, as there was not a direct link to the skills of the past.  The French had maintained this skill continuity and so the relevance to the British experience became clear.” It was quite something for Scott “to take a raw tree and watch it being turned into a building.”

Before computers – a simple planar geometry drawing (Cameron Scott)

In parallel, the ways both architects and the carpentry office team were working was going through a big transition. Computers and other parts of emerging building technologies were coming on stream, at once helping and hindering the construction process. Though a first Amstrad had appeared at COW, landing like an alien from outer space in the Colerne offices, none of the designing team took up the machine, so Scott continued to prepare drawings by hand. The situation there also highlighted the need for people to know considerably more detail about drawings arriving from architects in the frame yard. Scott’s role gravitated to helping join both sides up, smoothing the journey and becoming as much a co-ordinator as a framer. “It went from the drawings to putting the frames up. It was design, and problem solving, which could be a missing part of the process in the carpentry.” Increasingly Scott found himself in the office, drawing.

He saw his as an in-between role, both carpentry and architectural work. But he was beginning to tire of the framing. Mortising and tenoning till the cows came home had its pleasures, but the itch was waning, and eventually – maybe inevitably – he spent more and more time working at a table. “I set myself [a goal]; to work on one project a year as a carpenter, but then I wasn’t even managing to do even do that.”



Windsor Castle roof – photo Carpenter Oak                                                 

In Devon, his in-between role became, if anything, more pronounced, not least since barn-type timber frame homes were becoming a staple for COW and RJA. By the late nineties, Scott was a key part of COW’s framing assembly line, but given his carpentry and architectural skill and experience, his mind increasingly turned to setting up his own practice and offering an all-round service.

In all, Scott stayed at COW for seven years. He finally, took the plunge in 1998, first spending six months acquainting himself with 2D CAD programmes. He realised it  was too much, after six months the projects needed to get his one-man band operation off the ground hadn’t fallen into place.  As a new and first-time father, he stepped back into employee-ship and into a working architect role freelancing for James, whose work-load had grown on the back of the popularity for timber frame homes. However, by the late nineties, with COW over ten years old, both James and his colleague architects were tiring of the pure oak frames. The designs developed, morphed and were refined. In parallel, in 2001, James finally set up a physical studio, Roderick James Architects, in the alternative mecca of the South West, Totnes. As a more contemporary design direction was pursued, Scott contributed various ideas, playing an influential part in RJA’s calibrated reinvention. With fellow architect Mike Hope, he introduced stainless steel detailing, reworking elements of the framing to add in efficiency, as well as a shifting the aesthetics. Rather than pegs and dowels, tort steel lines were joined to fine edged plates and floor shoes, themselves fitted onto posts and other frame parts, bringing metallic contrast to what was formerly purely wood detailing. This experience fed into a continued desire to set up on his own.

Otterside – photo Cameron Scott

Cameron and (probably) David Young pit sawing at Colerne – photo Cameron Scott


“It wasn’t just about turning up in the morning and leaving at the end of the working day. There was a passion for skills. In the early days, the carpenters did so much together; pit sawing (and) planting trees.”

Yes, he acknowledges today, the framing tradition stood on the shoulders of a medieval, distinctly non-modern timber tradition. There was a purity to this rediscovered framing for some, for others it was too Luddite a way to building. It was a thousand miles from architecture. He loved it.

By the early nineties, when Scott arrived in Colerne, Carpenter Oak was already taking off. With a team of about 20, there was a sense of a bright future beckoning. Large, ambitious projects, ones that would make COW’s name as the go-to framing carpenters in the country, were happening. It instilled a confidence in the carpenters. Once there, Scott, who’d taken to the framing with enthusiasm, worked on several projects for the first few years. The last project of his Colerne period, was a major piece of conservation work; repairing the roof in Windsor Castle’s great hall that had been damaged by fire in 1992. The COW team, including Scott, worked at Windsor Castle through the following year. It was “an excellent experience” he says now.





Before computers too – 3D design plans by hand (Cameron Scott)

He also began to re-evaluate timber framing, specifically oak framing. Alongside Windsor, Carpenter Oak were working on another big project, the Bedales Olivier Theatre, promoted as a radical new oak-framing step. All sorts of rules, or at least framing presumptions, were broken by the FeildenClegg design. This initially stunned Scott, but then turned to admiration. The sound of pennies dropping passed his ears. At first “I was thinking ‘you can’t have these here.’” For framers. the use of light steel with the oak was heresy. “I just saw you could do a very different space if you structure the thing differently. It produced a totally different design strategy. It was like ‘Ah, okay, all you need is a different material and then you have a completely different language, structure and ultimately space that this approach allows.”

As the Windsor project came to an end, change was afoot at Colerne in other ways. With work expanding, and COW co-founder Roderick James already living at Seagull House on the South Devon coast, a second site in Devon was mooted, then found and opened – instigated by two of the earliest ‘COW-men’; Milton and Kirkup. Scott decided to move west too. “I was an itinerant at first, but moving to Devon ended that.”


Bedales Olivier Theatre – photo Carpenter Oak






Scott finally took the plunge and left RJA in January 2003. All through, the sustainability and environmental performance of buildings had been significant to him. He had been an early volunteer at CAT after all. Early on, while admiring the likes of pioneering eco-architects David Lea and Christopher Day, he felt there wasn’t enough scientific rigour in the work, no-one knew if the buildings delivered what was printed on the tin. A claim about energy performance was just that, a claim, but no one knew for sure. A characteristic of the eighties’ generation of architects who gravitated towards sustainability, Scott shares with the likes of contemporaries Gale & Snowden’s David Gale, Craig White, Duncan Baker-Brown and indeed younger generation, Architype architects, an emphasis on scientific measurement of exactly what was going on in buildings as the most reliable strategy for ensuring what they were designing would deliver energy performance wise. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that by the time he left RJA, Scott was becoming increasingly focused on the close relation between insulation and performance (he discovered Passivhaus in 2002, though didn’t pursue it further.) There was a fistful of issues. It included investigating the different insulation materials and systems on the market. “It was high on my agenda of things that I cared about,” noting how conventional insulation materials present significant challenges and concerns, both technically and environmentally. He began specifying only natural wood insulation”, becoming a fan. “It is great, in many respects it opens up the door to non-specialist insulation.”

Scott has become an ardent advocate of natural insulation, well insulated structures folding into a larger theme; how could timber frame buildings be much more effectively designed in order to be more efficient? Responding to the question led in two directions: One was electronic, the other woody.

The first took him off in the new direction of building performance research which involved designing and building the electronics and software required to answer the questions in hand. Working with his professional partner, Caroline Rye, the pair developed bespoke methodologies from 2009 onwards, starting with a SPAB (or Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings) project on a mainly voluntary basis, which turned into a commission in 2010 continuing through 2011. This led to setting up a formal company ArchiMetrics, the same year, which has subsequently gone on to provide research outputs for clients which include Trinity College Cambridge, The Woodland Trust, St Johns College Oxford and Historic Environment Scotland.





Lincoln Fields Restaurant – photo Cameron Scott

There were technical advantages with other species. Like many others, Scott moved his attention to Douglas fir and larch. “I’d been exposed to softwoods when I was working with Pat Borer at CAT.” He’d realised the framing revival, though inextricably bound up with oak, was also about these other species. “Douglas fir is a favourite tree. It’s well behaved and relatively easy to source locally.” He has been able to source high quality stands from Longleat Park, though also in the South West, where there is plenty, including on the Dartington Estate. Scott is “a big fan of softwood.” He believes many more stands need to be seeded and the use of softwoods to be taken up more widely.

There is a distinctive, if recognisable, style to Scott’s architecture. He encompasses an up to date and individual evolution of the framed barn house aesthetic established by COW and RJA, drawing out the architectural lines, as well as, out of view and unseen, integrating energy performance elements. It’s a modest and restrained aesthetic, not in anyone’s face, nor at the edge of any architectural style. It’s somehow unsurprising that, unlike many of his profession, Scott tends to eschew publicity. He is modest, too, in how he talks about the projects. “I’ve heard that people who visited my projects ask: ‘was this Cameron, who did this?’ as if they’re recognising something in the DNA.”



Earth Trust HQ building on site – photo Cameron Scott

There was also an inconvenient yet technically unavoidable framing question – timber frame’s iconic central species; oak. Having now been working for over a decade on certain projects, he’d come to reassess the archetypal English tree, seeing past its myth to some of the realities as a building material. “It is too heavy, too flexible, too expensive, too wet. Detailing oak frames is really very difficult and needs to be undertaken extremely carefully. Once built, oak timbers move around ‘horribly’ presenting some significant challenges when trying to meet an energy efficiency brief. Whilst there are many wonderful qualities of oak, dimension stability from green is not one of them, I have been in oak framed homes where you can see from the inside to the outside where there should be a continuity of envelope. If you’re trying to keep the heat in its essential to detail the building to hit airtightness targets.” It also became increasingly difficult to specify oak grown in Britain, French oak, and that from further afield, was cheaper and better quality, one reason it’s imported into the country in such prolific quantities. In return this makes the economics of stimulating a well-managed British woodland even more challenging.



The Earth Centre Trust– photo Cameron Scott

The Earth Centre Trust– photo Cameron Scott

Still, there are also a fair few scattered closer to his adopted home county, Devon. Winscombe is one in Somerset. There’s also the Dartmoor studio for sculptor Peter Randall-Page. Winscombe (2017), characterised by Scott as a hybrid extension/retrofit, is defined by the hillside site as an extension to an existing main building with significant client participation. As was Otterside, in Tipton St John, a flood resilient  timber frame, structured on stilts, is all timber, apart from the steel stilts, creating a partial steel timber hybrid and producing a different building. “Allies Farm” he adds, “was definitely part of the family.”

There is continuity from projects like Winscombe, in details and materials, he says, which were and have been refined and detailed, a point made something of on his website, committed to the principle of Kaizen; constant refinement. “The buildings look the way they are because of the way they’ve been built, rather than look the way because of style or image, like Poundbury. They get their continuity from the material used and detailing refined over time but are all very different in what they’re trying to do.”


Peter Randall-Page’s Studio – photo Cameron Scott

“There’s something that people are recognising,” he adds, believing that it instils a confidence in the client about his work. Though living on the edge of Dartmoor, projects have taken him all over the country, a counter to any sense that this his work is part of a regional new vernacular. Since beginning, Scott estimates, he’s completed or worked on around 150 projects, the majority timber frame of some description. For many years he worked under the semi-anonymous name Timber Design, though that is less in evidence these days. He works on his own, primarily on domestic projects, houses, extensions, and the like, though there are also quite a few non-domestic ones too. These have included a new restaurant in Lincoln Inn Fields, built largely offsite, and done without concrete, which received some positive attention in the architectural press. Generally, in contrast to many in his profession, Scott eschews media attention. There have been houses on the Isle of Eigg, Scotland, in Oxford and several in London. Probably the best-known is Allies Farmhouse, near Tilbury Juxta Clare, Essex, which received a flurry of awards and considerable publicity. The build is a new multi-part timber frame family farmhouse in East Anglia. It whizzed around the world appearing on “so many blogs I’d never heard of.”



Allies Farm – Photo Cameron Scott

There are other buildings which embody different lineages. He cites various refurbishments where reusing existing structures makes sense and involves a different approach. Straw Clay as an infill material  is also a material which he likes, “but these are very very labour intensive and slow, making it appropriate in very limited circumstances”. Of other materials, he says he would “love to do a CLT project,  the only one to have been designed was for himself in 2021 but was overtaken by a changing world!” footnoting how he likes ‘to explore new methods and keep learning’. He lists materials from CLT and engineered timber to CNC machines and other new media tech, before getting quietly passionate about home grown timber, and the need for home grown engineered woods. It is a list moving with the times, though whether he takes in the architectural trends and fashions happening across Britain and the continent, seems less likely.  

A case in point. There are those in ‘architecture-land’ who speak of the times both before and after Assemble. Assemble’s arrival, in the 2008-2010 recession period, saw the umbrella definition encompassed by the word ‘architect’ loosened and expanded.  Embraced by their architectural peers, the Erect’s, We Made That’s, and a long line of others, who began to take on this expanded approach, wanting to learn directly, through the nuts, bolts, mortices and tenons of building. Put to him, Scott is unconvinced. “It maybe depends on the person, some want to persue large or iconic architectural projects, others are perhaps more interested in how things are made and favour working more directly with materials and crafts people, I don’t think this is a new thing?”

Still, whatever level of change – or otherwise – there has been, Scott was there beforehand, and took the radical step much further, one of a very small number of architects of his eighties’ generation to fully immerse himself in timber framing. Out of this came a way of working born from integrating two different fields of skill and knowledge. Steeped in the language of oak and timber framing yet versed in the training and requirements of the architecture profession, it is not quite one or the other, but rather something which language has so far missed out on. Perhaps that is too grand a description. Still, as harbinger and exemplar of a certain type of deeper green sustainability, contemporary yet standing on the shoulders of the age-old timber framing tradition, Scott’s body of buildings provide a series of striking, if ever modest and practical examples, likely to be recognised as both influential and ahead of their time in years to come. ol

Further – www.scott.archi