Arrigoni Woods is rooted in a tradition of respect for craft and a vision for a life in relationship with wood, from the forest to the floor beneath your feet.
From its early foundation as a small family-owned company, Arrigoni Woods has grown to provide fully customized flooring and wood products that find their home anywhere from grand cabins in the American West to penthouse apartments in Manhattan and luxury retail stores in Europe. The ethos of Arrigoni Woods remains the same: a circle of respect for people, the materials, and the planet. It’s an all-encompassing vision of life in relationship with wood, from the forest to the floor beneath your feet, a solid foundation for family and friendships to grow, and a pride in the trust, care, and attention that it requires to craft that reality.
A conversation between Balz Arrigoni, Founder of Arrigoni Woods, and Peter Guthrie, Founder of DDG and Yellowtrees. The pair have collaborated closely on a range of projects since 2005.
Peter: People say you learn the most important business lessons when you work through problems. I first met Balz in the middle of a project when we had a problem back in 2005. We were laying a floor and the installer suspected there might be something wrong. I wasn’t so sure but we called Balz who showed up, took one look at the floor and said “This won’t do, we need to replace it.” It seemed a bit extreme to me, but he had such confidence I wasn’t going to argue. The problem was solved, the client was happy and I knew I had found a new partner.
Balz: As a young man in Switzerland, after graduating from University, I apprenticed as a woodworker, and later became a carpenter. When I started Arrigoni Woods, I used to install and finish everything myself. This training and experience taught me to spot any problem and deal with it instantly. Things should never be good enough, they should always be as good as they can be.
Peter: I never feel like I’ve been sold flooring by Arrigoni, it always feels like a collaboration. Balz is a master craftsman. He works with his hands. He uses the wood in a way only a craftsman can.
Balz: I care about the usage of our material and you want to work with people who understand and respect all the various elements: where it comes from, what works best where, and how it should be cared for. DDG desires a great product. They like to understand what’s going on and they have great respect for the craftsmen, the different design elements and the stories behind the materials.
Peter: Going to Austria to visit Admonter, the source of one of Balz’s suppliers, sealed the deal for me. After taking us to the best bakery in Salzburg’s old town for fresh raisin bread, we travelled through The Sound of Music landscape to Admont – a picturesque village in the mountains with a beautiful Benedictine Monastery.
Balz: At Admonter they balance tradition with modernity. They combine historic knowledge and time-honoured skills with cutting-edge technology, business and environmental innovation that feels so far ahead of the rest of the industry. The company burns the leftover wood to make energy, which not only heats half the village, but they then sell the surplus energy back to the state too. At the heart of all this though is an excellent product – they make beautiful engineered wood floorboards. A wood floor creates atmosphere and gives a building a particular feeling. It breathes. When you touch it, you feel something.
Peter: It seems so radically simple. What you take away from Admonter in the product is a feeling. With human history and culture in the mix, you get an added depth of experience; you’re buying into something special, responsible, considered, and thoughtful. The story becomes much deeper and richer. We like to tell these stories in our work. It reinforces the intention and the feeling of the whole project. Clients like to understand where things have come from and why they have been specified. It helps them feel connected to know the provenance.
Balz: When you buy a product it’s important to question where it comes from. We should find out what happens behind the scenes, just as we do with food.
Peter: I like to work with materials that change over time; there’s a richness in the stories told by a patina that has developed over time and use. There’s an increasing hunger for the simplicity, strength and soul of natural, tactile materials, generally.
Balz: I always say that having a wood floor is like having a piece of mother nature in your building or home. It’s healthy, it feels good, it lasts. Wood is warm, as you say. When I was doing my apprenticeship in the carpenter’s workshop we would leave the sawdust on the floor because it was softer and felt more natural to walk on than the concrete underneath.
Peter: My grandmother was a frugal Scot’s woman and she had a saying: “If nothing else, make sure you have a good pair of shoes.” In architecture this means having a good floor. It’s a fundamental baseline and a grounding architectural experience. Whether you’re in a temple in Kyoto, a palazzo in Italy or a farmhouse in the US, the feeling of the floor underpins your experience of a space. With domestic architecture we strive for a counterbalance in urban settings, creating a calming environment, like an oasis. The warmth of a wood floor achieves this perfectly. There’s a particular feeling attached to different materials – a wooden floor speaks of the timeless European tradition of quality, craft and heritage. Working with Arrigoni Woods has brought this feeling to life for me.
A Family Business
Arrigoni Woods began as a family business, and though the business has grown considerably in the past two decades, upgrading to larger warehouses and partnerships in cities outside of Vail, Balz and his wife Christina still share an office whose walls are decorated with gold medals for ski racing won by their two teenage sons. Wood brings nature and life into any space; it’s all about finding the right fit.
The Source
Sustainably harvested from carefully managed old-growth forests that surround a picturesque village in the heart of the Austrian mountains, the materials we use are sourced with the utmost respect. We believe wood is not just a commodity, but a process that takes time, experience, and care. To ethically manage the forests that supply us with this resource is to help support a better future for ourselves and our children.
Heritage
Beside our workshop sits a hundred and fifty year old wooden chalet, carefully relocated from its original home in the mountains of Austria. The smooth lines of its exterior walls were carved by hand with axes, each giant plank of wood joined by precise cuts. All of this wood, almost two hundred years old, fit back together perfectly even after being disassembled and shipped across the ocean to the arid mountains of Colorado.
Reclaimed wood provides natural beauty and a feeling of history – it’s a tradition of craft that we have a deep reverence for at Arrigoni Woods.
One of a Kind
We deeply value our relationships with our suppliers, like Geyer, the family run timber processing firm in Bavaria, and Praschberger, a family business of wood manufacturing in Salzburg, Austria. Trees grow slowly, gently spreading their root systems down into the earth until their foundations are solid– our approach to our supplier relationship shares a similar tradition. In the early years of the company, a relationship with the highly respected Austrian wood product manufacturer Admonter led to the importing of engineered wood flooring from sustainably managed forests near the picturesque village of Admont – our twenty-year relationship continues to this day, and Admonter is the largest supplier of Arrigoni Woods.
