A vacant former car dealership in west Eugene is being turned into offices for the growing Zip-O business, the longtime Eugene maker of specialty timbers and beams.
The family that owns Zip-O Log Mills and Zip-O Laminators bought the distinctive Sheppard Motors building at 2300 West 7th Avenue late last year and is proceeding with renovations.
The place had been empty since earlier in 2024 when Sheppard moved into its prominent newly built car dealership off North Game Farm Road in northeast Eugene, next to Interstate 5.
Zip-O, which operates two mills in Eugene and one in Goshen, has emerged as a player in the laminated beam and structural timbers market in North America.
“We have been growing over the last several years,” says CEO James Workman. The company, with about 200 workers, will centralize administrative staff at the former car dealership, he says.
Compared to the many unremarkable buildings lining West 7th entering Eugene, the 60-year-old former Sheppard building stands out, with its soaring V-shaped glass front that rises 30 feet or more.
But Zip-O’s own projects put the Sheppard building to shame. Zip-O produced the nearly 2,000 laminated beams needed for the massive exposed-wood ceiling work at the new Portland Airport terminal. Other recent projects include making 86-foot-long exposed ceiling beams for a high school gym in Alaska, and producing laminated beams up to 50 feet long for a new building at the California Institute of Technology.
The projects are all part of the nationwide trend toward using “mass timber,” thick layers of wood, in place of steel or concrete.
Listed at $4.4 million
The October sale deed didn’t list a price for the old dealership property. But the Sheppard family, which had owned the building for years, had listed it for sale at $4.4 million. That’s about the same market value ascribed to it by the Lane County assessor.
Workman says the company paid “much less” than that.
Zip-O, 81 years old and still owned by the founding Hallstrom family, is a resilient competitor in the volatile Oregon lumber products industry.
“The company has had to reinvent itself several times,” Workman says.
In recent decades, many smaller mills have shut or been absorbed into larger corporations.
Zip-O has avoided the highly competitive market of standard two-by-four or two-by-six dimensional lumber, and instead focused on specialty products.
Zip-O opened its laminated beam mill on West 1st Avenue nine years ago.
Its West 6th Avenue mill produces custom Douglas-fir posts, beams and other specialty structural components for residential and commercial buildings, especially ones calling for exposed wood.
Zip-O also operates a planer mill and sorting yard at the former Cone Lumber mill in Goshen, south of Eugene. Zip-O bought that property for $1.55 million in 2015 as part of Cone’s bankruptcy, records show.
This fall and winter, Zip-O will remodel the former car dealership’s showroom and parts room into offices, Workman says. It hasn’t decided what to do with former repair shop space, he says. The building totals 22,000 square feet and sits on three acres.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.