Wood has a unique cellular structure
Look at a piece of wood under a microscope and you will see that it's made up of thousands of hollow cells. These natural building blocks are formed from tiny cellulose fibers. These fibers and the cells they form are cemented together by a natural glue called lignin. No other building material is structured this way. No other building material has this natural insulative quality. Fiberglass and Styrofoam are also insulators, but only because of the trapped air and not because of the materials themselves.

A log has the ability to absorb, store and radiate heat. The bigger or massive it is, the longer it takes to exhaust its stored heat. A frame wall filled with fiberglass reaches its equilibrium condition in about two hours - a log wall can take up to two days! Similarly, a frame wall will lose its heat in about two hours if the temperature drops, but a log wall will retain its stored heat for two days.

Wood is stronger than steel, pound for pound
Wood has incredible strength. This strength comes from its cellular structure. And the lignin that binds the cells together is not only strong, it's elastic. So wood has "give". This explains why wood floors are less tiring to walk on than concrete. Also why wood will bend without breaking under the stress of high winds or earthquakes.

Wood is a natural insulator
We have already mentioned wood's insulative qualities under the discussion on cellular structure. Some examples of wood's superiority are:

• It would take a concrete wall 5 feet thick to equal the insulating quality of just 4 inches of wood.
• Wood insulated 6 times better than brick, 15 times better than concrete, and 1,770 times better than aluminum.

Wood isn't as dense as it looks. It's cellular structure contains millions of tiny air spaces. And air is one of the best insulators known.

Tests conducted at Arizona State University show that wooden houses use 23% less fuel than masonry houses during the winter, and 30.2% less fuel during the air conditioning season.

Wood is also a valuable acoustical material. It can reflect or absorb sound waves and is used extensively in churches, auditoriums and schools for sound control. Many top quality musical instruments are made of wood because they resonate at frequencies common to music, once again partly because of the cellular structure.

How fire resistant is a log house?
The thinner a piece of combustible material, the faster the flame spread. A solid wall will burn more slowly than a hollow wall. Usually, the contents of a home will spread the fire faster than the structure itself. This was evident in a recent fire in a Japanese log museum built in the 6th Century - the works of art were destroyed while the structure itself, though blackened, was hardly damaged.Wood lasts for centuries
The lignin that binds wood's cells together is not only strong and elastic, it's largely impervious to water and extremes of heat and cold.

Wood slows down the burn-through rate. In most fires the inhabitants of the building succumb to toxic fumes, lack of oxygen or heat before the structure itself collapses. In a steel structure that's on fire fire the inhabitants would be unable to touch the structure, or walk on stairs, for instance, it would soon be so hot. Solid log walls, however, will keep the inhabitants safer in a fire than steel, frame construction, brick, cement block or stone walls.

Many woods are also naturally resistant to decay. Fallen redwood trees have been found unaffected by decay and insects after lying on the ground for more than a century.

There are thousands of examples all over the world of log houses which have been properly cared for lasting for hundreds of years, even a thousand years or more in some cases.