Growing up on what remained of his family’s dairy farm in eastern Massachusetts, Ethan was first exposed to timber frame construction while working summers at the Natick Community Farm. Located on land that his family used to hay, the farm gave Ethan the opportunity to work with hand tools, build with living materials, and connect with one of the last rural parts of his rapidly suburbanizing home landscape. To put it shortly, it was probably the seminal experience of his young life. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts from Sterling College in 2014, Ethan spent the next few years working at timber frame shops and log building yards around New England, gaining valuable experience in developing his understanding of the craft, while trying to hide all the mistakes he could from his employers. In 2017, he moved to Michigan for the promise of 3 meals and 20 dollars a day in exchange for his help in constructing a new milking parlor on the family farm of his two close friends. As the interest in timber frames continued to develop, and figuring that someplace is better than anyplace, Ethan leaned in and started Roof Jumper Timber Frames in July of 2019. Since starting the business, Ethan has had an incredible outpouring of support from the local community and has had the special good fortune to work directly with several small, diversified farms in the Ann Arbor area.

Perhaps the most gratifying, and most intimate experience of my life has been to build living, breathing, working buildings for the members of a small farm community. Working with a medium imbued with life itself, and the opportunity to create spaces that change the way we feel has become the focus of my life’s ambition.

The Roof Jumper:
As my mother recounted to me, our family had 5 barns on the farm. The “fives”, the “tens” (with 5 and 10 stalls, respectively), the “boxes” (divided into 4 box stalls for calving), the new barn (pictured in the logo), and the roof jumper, the back of which was cut heavily into the hillside, so that the eaves one side almost touched the ground. This small shanty of a half fieldstone, half scrap wood barn was the building my family first lived in after emigrating from Syria in the 1890’s.

The perhaps apocryphal legend behind the name has to do with a white Holstein that, sometime in the early 50’s, escaped one day after chores, and being cut off from escape, ran up the hillside, onto the roof, and jumped down into the squash garden. Whether or not the specific details have survived the years, whether or not it even happened, what is certain is that the barn was called the Roof Jumper, and still is in the stories of my family. It’s the stories, the legends, and the memories of the rural closeness, the poverty and thrift, and the work that my family shared that first directed my life and helped form the basis of how I choose to manifest myself in this lifetime. The name isn’t what’s important, it’s the memory, the legend, and the world that they both represent.