Timber Trusses for Houses, Homes, Churches, Barns, Porte Cocheres, Hotels

Vermont Timber Works custom designs, engineers and builds heavy timber and post & beam roof trusses to add beauty to the interiors of all kinds of projects from residential great rooms to churches to hotel lobbies and more! While all our trusses look decorative, most are structural and are designed to carry heavy roof loads.

Why use faux beams when you can use natural wood?

Timber Roof Truss Information for Residential and Commercial Work:

Post and beam trusses really dress up living rooms, great rooms, lobbies and foyers. There are several popular styles of decorative trusses that look great.

King Post Roof Trusses are the most cost effective, and they look great when curved braces and webs are used. A king post truss solves many structural problems as well. Its bottom chord acts as a ‘tie’ for the room, holding the walls from spreading. In the South a king post roof truss may be able span 36 feet with 16 foot spacing, where the same truss in a snow belt up north may only be able to span 24 feet with the same spacing. We size all of our truss members for the exact region where they are being installed and we provide detailed shop drawings with a structural engineer’s stamp.

Modified King Post Trusses can be used when more visual height is desired. We used this style truss in the Hawthorn Suites Lobby in Burlington, VT

Queen Post Roof Trusses are very similar in design to king post trusses except that the interior of the truss has two vertical ‘queen posts’ instead of one central ‘king post’. They look great and offer an open area in the middle of the truss. Queen post timber trusses can easily span 30 feet or more when they are spaced around 12 feet apart.

This is a great looking modified scissor truss that we used in Wakenah Indoor Swimming Pool . It is both decorative and structural with traditional and steel joinery.

A favorite truss is a Traditional Hammer Beam Roof Truss. Its design comes from the old style cathedrals in Europe and the United States. It is beautiful with its graceful center arch, but like the cathedrals, it needs to be buttressed on the outside or by other parts of the building. The Breed Residence also uses a classic hammer beam truss in the living room. Its loads are transferred to surrounding walls and roofs. The Breed Pool House uses a modified hammer beam design (discussed below) and carries all of its loads internally.

Modified Hammer Beam Trusses have a great look with their open design and arched webs and braces. No buttressing is required. A center king post is used in the truss’s interior and a collar tie is placed about half way down the truss giving a great open cathedral look. Graceful arched braces run from the collar tie down to hammer posts, and lower braces run from the hammer tie down to an outside post.Modified trusses shown on this site were used at Trapp Family Lodge and The Breed Pool House.