Paul & Carrie
Albion Lumber is Paul and Carrie. That’s not a figure of speech. When you call, one of them answers. When you come out to the yard, one of them will walk you through the stack. This is their livelihood, and it shows in how they run the place.
Paul knows this wood the way you know something you’ve spent your whole life around. He can look at a board and tell you what it’s right for. He can mill it to spec on site. And if your project has a complication — an unusual dimension, an old profile that no longer exists in a catalog — that’s exactly the kind of problem he’s good at.
Carrie keeps the whole operation organized and moving. She knows the customers, knows the community, and takes seriously the idea that a small business in a small town earns its reputation one transaction at a time. There are no bad surprises when you buy from them.
A century of lumber on the Mendocino Coast
For over a hundred years, the Mendocino Coast has been a force in the timber business of California. This was once of the most active timber regions in the state — old-growth forests, steam-powered mills, logging roads cut into the hills above the Pacific.
Most of that era is gone. The big operations are long since closed or moved on. But the knowledge of this wood — how it grows, how it mills, how it ages — that stayed with the Shandel family. Four generations of it.
When you buy redwood lumber from Albion Lumber, you’re buying from people who have been paying attention to this particular wood, in this particular place, for a very long time.
Albion, Mendocino County
Albion sits at the mouth of a small river on California’s Mendocino Coast, roughly halfway between Fort Bragg and Point Arena. It’s the kind of place that gets its own weather. Fog in the morning, sometimes sun by noon, the ocean always nearby. Redwood grows well here precisely because of that climate.
The Mendocino Coast has always been lumber country. The towns up and down this stretch of Highway 1 were mostly built by the mill industry, and many of the buildings still standing are held together by old-growth redwood that will outlast whatever gets built next to them.
We serve contractors and builders throughout Mendocino, Sonoma, and Napa counties. But if you’re working on something nearby — a renovation in Mendocino village, a new build in the Anderson Valley, a barn in Boonville — come out to the yard. We’re easy to find, and we like talking about projects.
How we do business
We don’t have a long list of policies. The short version: we stand behind our products, even when it’s not equitable to. If something isn’t right, we make it right. We’d rather lose money on a board than lose the relationship with the person who bought it.
Most of our customers are contractors and builders who come back regularly. Some of them have been buying from us for years. That’s not an accident. It’s the result of being straight with people, having what we say we have, and cutting it the way we say we’ll cut it.
We also work with homeowners, architects, and renovation specialists doing custom or historical work. If you’re new to us, the best introduction is a phone call or a visit. We’d rather spend fifteen minutes with you on the phone than have you drive out here for something we don’t have.
See what we carry — or go straight to visiting the yard.