One home. Four seasons.

A house should be built through the whole Montana year.

This is a meadow off Trail Creek Road in June: stakes, string, and a dirt two-track. Before the excavator showed up we had walked this ground a dozen times, in morning light and evening wind, until we knew where winter sun would land and where the snow would drift.

Foundations go in while the ground is warm and dry. Get summer right and the rest of the year follows.

Summer · Siting & foundation

Keep scrolling. Watch the year turn.

The frame goes up in five days. It was months in the making.

While the foundation cured, this frame was being cut in our shop in Four Corners: Douglas fir bents, mortise-and-tenon joints, white oak pegs, every stick test-fit on the shop floor before it ever saw the site.

Raising week comes in October. A crane, our crew of nine, and by Friday the skeleton of the house stands against the first gold in the aspens.

Fall · The raising

Snow on the roof, trades inside.

We race exactly one deadline: enclosed before the snow flies. Structural panels wrap the frame, the standing-seam roof goes on, windows get set, and then the storms can do what they like.

Winter is inside work, and it is the longest stretch of the build: stairs, casework, stone, plaster. The slow months are where a house earns its finish.

Winter · Enclosed & finish work

Keys at green-up.

Twelve to fourteen months after the stakes went in, there is smoke in the chimney and mud on the road, and the meadow is coming back around a house that looks like it grew there.

That is the honest timeline for a hand-cut timber frame home. We will not quote you a faster one to win the job.

Spring · Move-in

See how a build year runs

Ridgeline & Larch

Hand-cut frames from a shop in Four Corners, raised across southwest Montana.

We are a design-build shop of eleven people: framers, joiners, and two principals who still cut joints. Every frame leaves our shop as a numbered kit of Douglas fir and western larch, each timber planed, mortised, and pegged by the same hands that raise it.

We take on three to four homes a year between Bozeman, Big Sky, Livingston, and the Paradise Valley. That is a deliberate ceiling. It keeps one of us on your site every week and keeps the shop honest.

2012Founded in Bozeman

3–4Homes a year, by design

12–14Months, dirt to keys

MTLicensed Montana general contractor

Recent work

Three houses, three pieces of ground.

Timber frame lodge lit at dusk on a lakeshore, mountains behind, reflected in still water — **The Lakeside Lodge**Hebgen Lake · 4,800 sq ft · Douglas fir

Timber frame home on a rocky ridge at sunset, sky streaked orange behind the gable — **The Bridger Ridge House**Bridger Canyon · 3,600 sq ft · Fir & larch

Great room interior with exposed timber trusses, stone fireplace, and a wall of glass facing snowy peaks — **Inside the frame**Why exposed structure is the finish → the craft

“They told us fourteen months on the first phone call and handed us keys in month thirteen. Every week we knew exactly what was happening on our site.”

Anna · Paradise Valley

Two build slots open for next year

Start with a site walk.

Bring us to your ground before you bring us drawings. We will walk it with you, talk sun, snow, access, and budget, and tell you plainly whether a timber frame belongs there.

Book a site walk

Or call the shop: (406) 555-0147