Our Story

Rafael Cortez grew up in his grandfather's woodshop in East Los Angeles, where he learned to see the beauty and potential in every piece of timber. His abuelo, a cabinetmaker who emigrated from Oaxaca in the 1960s, taught him that good wood tells a story - the rings record years of sun and rain, the grain reveals the tree's character, and the patina speaks to the hands that shaped it.

After earning a degree in Environmental Science from UCLA and spending five years working in urban forestry management, Rafael found himself at a crossroads. In 2014, while consulting on a demolition project in Downtown LA, he watched a crew feed thousands of board feet of century-old Douglas fir and heart pine into a dumpster bound for the Puente Hills landfill. The wood was from original joists, beams, and flooring of a 1912 warehouse - tight-grained old-growth lumber that simply does not exist in new-growth forests today.

“I stood there watching this incredible material being destroyed, and something just clicked,” Rafael recalls. “I thought about my grandfather, who would have wept to see wood like that thrown away. I thought about the forests we're cutting down to make new lumber that isn't half as good. And I thought: somebody needs to stop this. Why not me?”

Rafael emptied his savings, borrowed a truck, and convinced the demolition foreman to let him take the wood instead of sending it to the dump. He stored it in a rented warehouse, spent weekends denailing and sorting, and began selling to local woodworkers and furniture makers. Within three months, he had more demand than he could fill. Los Angeles Lumber was born.

A decade later, that impulse to rescue beautiful wood from destruction has grown into the largest reclaimed lumber operation in Greater Los Angeles. But Rafael still personally inspects salvage sites, still gets excited when his team uncovers a cache of rare old-growth timber, and still keeps a piece of that original 1912 Douglas fir on his desk as a reminder of why he started.