Shou sugi ban: a slow and ancient process
The Nant founder Sam Meehan shares the ancient Japanese technique for darkening wood that he used to create the Ebba cabin’s striking exterior.
The idea for Ebba was to create a Japanese water garden in the Welsh hills – lots of rock, wood, and moving water.
Early on, for the cabin design we settled on a form with low pitched hip roof, which felt very Japanese. While researching other Japanese design and build styles we came across burnt cladding, or shou sugi ban. This is a process where you burn the face of the wood to darken the colour. This also preserves it against fungi and insects.
I love a fire whether it’s for cooking or for making things, so this technique was instantly appealing.
Mastering the burn
The traditional burning method is to make a chimney out of the planks and send the fire straight up it. This is very time consuming and hard to monitor how the wood is burning as the planks are all faced into the fire.
We experimented with various size blow torches, all of which took ages. They weren’t hot enough and only burned a small area at a time.
In the end we built a furnace from old storage heaters bricks salvaged from a local reclamation yard. Our first oven used standard building bricks, which all cracked once at full heat.
We put two letter box-shaped holes on either side of the furnace so that we could feed the planks through over the fire and adjusted the speed to get the right level of burn. There were lots of fried-to-a-crisp planks, and many had barely any signs of a burn, but in the end we found the right speed to push the planks through and most importantly how hot to have the oven. Very.
So the final touch was positioning the leaf blower at the base of the furnace, which acted like a supercharged bellows and massively increased the heat – and the danger element! In the end we could get two 5m planks done in under a minute and they looked great. Then we scraped the ash, washed them in the stream and applied a little UV oil so they didn’t fade in the sun.
For the timber we looked at various native species and settled on larch, which when burnt and scraped off has a dark red rusty hue. This looks really cool against the deeper black burnt grain.
A beautiful and worthwhile finish
The process is time consuming and messy, there's lots of smoke, dust and ash in the eyes so masks and goggles are essential. But the finish is great and the process very satisfying. Each piece of wood burns differently, giving the cabin real depth and texture.
We’e just placed an order with our local saw mill and will run the whole process again in a few weeks for the next cabin. Watch this space!
To experience a luxurious stay at Ebba, our Japanese water garden in the Welsh hills, visit the-nant.co.uk/ebba