About the shop
A framer and an architect walked into a bar in Livingston.
That is genuinely how it started, in 2012, over an argument about whether beautiful structure and a buildable budget could live in the same house. Fourteen years and forty-odd frames later, the argument continues, productively.
Dane Kirkeby
Co-founder · Head of the frame shopDane grew up outside Livingston stacking hay and taking apart his grandfather's barn, an education he claims was equal parts carpentry and archaeology. He apprenticed with a timber framing crew in Whitefish, spent three seasons cutting frames in Vermont, and came home convinced Montana deserved the same joinery tradition.
He runs the shop floor, cuts the hardest joints himself, and still climbs the frame every raising week. If you visit the shop on a Friday, he is the one covered in fir shavings.
Mara Voss
Co-founder · Design & client leadMara practiced architecture in Seattle for nine years, designing mountain houses she rarely got to see built, before moving to Bozeman and deciding she would rather see every one of hers through to the punch list. She leads design, engineering coordination, and the weekly client walk-throughs.
Her rule for the office: no drawing leaves until someone prices it. It is why our budget bands hold and why clients hear hard numbers in month one instead of month nine.
How we work
Small on purpose.
Eleven people: six in the frame shop, four on site, and the two of us splitting design, budgets, and phone calls. We cap the calendar at three or four homes a year so a principal is on every site every week, and we turn down work that would break that rule.
We are a licensed Montana general contractor, members of the Timber Framers Guild, and we self-perform the frame, the raising, and the finish carpentry. Foundations, mechanical, and roofing go to the same handful of Gallatin Valley subs we have used for a decade, and we put their names in your contract so you know who is on your ground.
“Dane climbed down off the ridge beam to show our eight-year-old how a peg drives home. That is the kind of outfit they are.”Tom · Big Sky
Meet us on your land or in the shop.
Either works. Both is better: see the joinery first, then show us where the house wants to sit.
Book a site walkOr call the shop: (406) 555-0147