Prowell’s custom wood garden arbors are built to your specified dimensional widths. Designed to mount as a gate arbor or as stand-alone garden arbor mounted to posts, columns, or wall-tops.

The Wood Gate Arbor: Accentuating and complimenting the Prowell Gate in both design and workmanship.

The Wood Garden Arbor: Situated within the landscape as a free-standing architectural detail, mounting to existing or site-provided posts or walls.

Available in Western Red Cedar only.

Shipping 87% off standard Freight rates to all 50 states.

Prowell’s  custom wood garden arbors will not change your life. They will not initiate the sort of transformation that from point of entry to point of egress alters the balance of the universe.

They serve no real function beyond supporting your honeysuckles.

They will not keep birds from your garden or rain from wetting your head or the sunlight from burning the back of your neck.

They just might, potentially, for a brief millisecond, harbor you from the wayward comet choosing that exact coordinate of your garden arbor to strike the earth. In fact we’ll go ahead and warranty your wood arbor in the event of such.

So why bother? well . . . it can be, as mentioned, a kindly host to your honeysuckle and wisteria. And it can represent an act of beauty in what can often seem a cruel and unforgiving world. It can serve to ratify the presence of a Prowell gate that might otherwise be alone, all alone, in a landscape of blinding commonality.

Below, What you might expect to encounter as a mission statement penned by a normal company. To achieve this end, we’ve hired the normality of Adlai Means, formerly of Hallmark. He’s been awarded a corner in the loft of the shop. A closet, essentially, equipped with a typewriter and an ashtray and a poster of a coral island in the middle of the Indian Ocean to prevent claustrophobic meltdown.

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Prowell & Prowell’s arbors presented on the following pages will appear as a departure from the more common structures most of you associate with every day arbors. You will not find layers and levels stacked upon one another, or grids and lattices laid over one another. You will not find an assortment of screws or nails or metal fasteners. What you will experience is an assembly of subtle, clean lines secured with a complexity of joinery that will last a lifetime, and beyond.

On first sighting, it may trigger a recognition of something less cluttered, less convoluted, without the built-up muscle and mass of the Lego-like arbors that manage, repeatedly, to up-stage a lovely garden like engineer boots on a dance floor.

In reality, there should be no single feature of a home’s architecture or landscape that overwhelms or upstages the whole. Designing a residence or a landscape is a team effort, in that it’s varying components belong as if they were pieces to a coherent puzzle. The custom wood gate arbor design marks the initial impression to your residence and yet, ultimately, it is nothing more than a member of the supporting cast, contributing to the overall site design.

Of course there is a tendency, a matter of human behavior, to find an artist or tradesman wanting to stand above the fray. Creating works that are out of sync with their surroundings in an effort to be noticed. We all, I suppose, want to noticed.

If we consider art and design on this premise, we quickly separate those works that are in fact stand-alone creations, such as paintings, fashion apparel, even automobile designs. These all are judged on the merits of themselves alone, having no relation to anything but their own existence. We cannot say that Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake upstages itself, because it is itself. But if we were to implant a chapter of this phonetic-like prose from this virtually unreadable novel and insert it into one of his earlier, more readable works, and suddenly it rises like a North Atlantic storm in January. Horrific swells breaking like troughs of shattered glass against the backdrop of a younger Joyce who wrote readable sentences.

The landscape and architecture of a residential property exist as a family. They are as related to one another as the background and foreground of a painted canvass. And nowhere is more restraint needed than with the first impressionable sighting of the garden or gate arbor upon approach. All the effort and expense invested into the home itself and the success or failure of this investment rests, on first impressions, with the merits of these front-and -center assemblies.

Prowell’s custom wood arbors are often commissioned along with our garden gates and fence panels in a matching complimentary design. The gate arbors arrive as full assemblies designed to mount to gate posts or wall-tops.

Adlai Means
Chief Assistant Linguist