Cedar is the right roof when the building wants wood — a mountain house, a lake house, a roof that should look like it grew there — and the owner accepts the honest trade: 30 to 50 years of service, with maintenance, instead of slate's century. The condition is the installer. Almost nobody still knows how to install cedar right, and installed wrong, a cedar roof lasts half as long.
The look only wood gives
A cedar shake roof done right is one of the most beautiful things you can put on a house: deep shadow lines, natural variation, a roof that belongs to its setting. Shakes are the thicker, hand-split, rustic cut; shingles are sawn and more uniform. Both are cedar, and both weather into the landscape in a way no manufactured material has matched.
The trade, stated plainly
Slate is a century. Cedar is 30 to 50 years, installed right and maintained. Cedar asks for periodic cleaning and inspection along the way; we offer maintenance plans, because a cedar roof with good bones is worth keeping. If you want the last roof you will ever buy, that is slate's argument — and it is a strong one. If the building wants wood, cedar's shorter life is the price of the look, and plenty of owners pay it gladly, with their eyes open.
Cedar or slate for a lake house?
At Lake Keowee we have put cedar shingles and copper on a mountain retreat, and graduated slate and copper on another house on the same water. Both were right — for different buildings and different owners. The slate house bought permanence. The cedar house bought warmth and texture, and an owner who understood the maintenance that comes with it. That is the whole decision: know which buyer you are.
Our cedar work also stands in Atlanta and in Roswell. Cedar is one of this company's specialties, not a sideline — and the knowledge it takes is, as we say on the cedar page, a dying craft that we guard.
What does cedar cost?
We won't publish a figure: cedar pricing moves with the lumber market and depends on the roof — its size, its pitch, and the underlayment and ventilation system the wood needs to reach its years. We price every job individually. What we can tell you is that with cedar, the installer matters more than the material: an installation that halves the roof's life is the expensive one, whatever it cost.
— Gary Shank