AR: With your populist sensibilities, how do you justify doing houses for extremely wealthy people, in fact Bill Gates, one the richest men in the world?

JC: Look what we got out of Gates. For one thing, we got the world's first heavy-timber-recycling sawmill. Did you know that? Bill wanted the best quality wood in the world and wanted us to look at a nearby forest and see which trees we wanted to cut down. Well, this was at the height of the Spotted Owl crisis here in the Northwest. There was no way I was going to cut down oak. As luck would have it, that very weekend I met this guy, Max Talbert, out of Duluth, who's a salvaged-lumber salesman, and he says, "Jim, I think you should build Gates's house out of salvaged lumber." So my partner, Peter Bohlin, and I got a couple of samples and proposed to Bill that he set up a sawmill for salvaged lumber. Bill created GR Plume & Company and funded it to the tune of a couple million. It was the first heavy-timber-recycling sawmill in the world.