Master carpenter Daniel Poguntke is constantly mobile, working for his customers on construction sites and in the workshop.

Town, country, sea

Daniel Poguntke founded Meisterkollektiv 15 years ago with colleagues and has since become the sole owner. Business is booming. The master carpenter in northern Germany can only dream of spending more time at the sea and less time at work.

Daniel Poguntke

Master carpenter

Daniel Poguntke founded Meisterkollektiv in 2006 with six timber construction colleagues. What remains of the former collective today is a close partnership. He kept the company name. His twelve employees are based in Seevetal and travel out from there to work primarily in the metropolitan region of Hamburg

Daniel Poguntke agrees to meet us on a Monday morning at a construction site in a residential suburb south of Hamburg. His employees show up on time in the company’s red vans with the eye-catching Meisterkollektiv logo. The boss himself leads the way in his matte black Chevy pickup, a classic American car that holds some nostalgia for him because it reminds him of his time travelling around the USA as part of his master training.

Daniel Poguntke is a free spirit. And he’s one of those people who radiate an impressive level of competence and authority, without constantly having to flaunt it. At just over 40 years of age, he comes across as calm and unhurried – and yet he is constantly in action. He heads up a carpentry firm, but doesn’t have to prove that he’s the boss on a daily basis. He knows what he can do – and that’s a whole lot.

Framework and cladding on modern wooden houses must withstand the sometimes harsh Baltic Sea climate.

Master, multitasker, man of action

On the construction site, Poguntke and his team are renewing a roof truss. The pantiles have just arrived and are being received by employees on the roof ridge. The gable wall will also be given a wood façade. The master himself is lending a hand, discussing tasks with his foreman and giving tips along the way to one of the three apprentices currently undergoing training at his company. He is fully present, even if he has to keep multiple jobs on multiple construction site in mind at the same time. ‘It’s not that orders are flooding in, but business is going really well,’ Poguntke says happily.

Daniel Poguntke uses his HKC 55 and the new SYS-PowerStation to cut boards.

If you are fortunate enough to be able to pick and choose your jobs, unusual orders are, of course, especially tempting. Take the ‘Meerleben’ project, for example, where the master carpenter takes us in the afternoon: A development of holiday homes situated between Wismar and Boltenhagen, 800 metres from the Baltic Sea coast. Munich-based architect Patric F. C. Meier from the agmm Architekten company had the idea to plan 14 eco-friendly timber houses here on a small hill, establishing a joint construction venture.

Ecological timber construction by the sea

The cooperative concept extends to the design itself, which is shared by all the wooden homes – the idea being that the owners would then personalise the homes according to their own taste later. The exterior walls all consist of 16 cm thick solid construction timber with 24 mm Douglas fir cladding for the façade. Air-injected insulation made from untreated fir and spruce wood fibres delivers ecological insulation for the homes; the smallest house in the development even has seaweed insulation. 30 mm solid silver fir boards reinforce the framework inside.

‘The exciting thing is that with this consistent style of wooden construction, the raw structure is also the interior structure at the same time,’ Poguntke explains. In this project he has acted as a double agent of sorts: As the timber construction builder for the entire development and as an owner and member of the building cooperative. In his own house, most of the interior walls are covered in sanded wooden surfaces. All of the interior wall surfaces attached to exterior walls have a silt loam plaster surface in order to change up the aesthetics of the interior while also improving the insulation.

Daniel Poguntke has it good here. Now, thanks to this holiday home development and his house there, the carpenter would be able to really enjoy life at the seaside, if only he had a little more free time and a little less work. But for now he can’t even think about that. Instead, he sits at a heavy wooden table with a wonderful grain, opens up his laptop and gets to work – but still with the nice feeling of being able to work in a place where others go for holidays.