Why Douglas and not larch
For the garage door, larch was the obvious choice. It became Douglas anyway. The reason lies in trade dimensions and how the wood weathers.
When you build a timber garage door for outdoor use, larch is the first name that comes up. Durable and hard. But for this project it became Douglas, and the reason is more than availability.
Douglas is good timber. Stable, strong and workable, with a price-quality ratio that makes it better for structural applications than its reputation suggests. It weathers uniformly to silver-grey outdoors, provided it is well-detailed with sufficient overhang and drainage. That is a property you want in a door that will stand outside for decades.
The first practical argument is trade dimensions. Douglas is widely available in the Netherlands in the sections the construction requires: stiles at 100×100mm, bottom rails at 120×120mm. Larch in those dimensions is less common, requiring custom ordering or resawing from larger stock. That makes each component harder to replace individually in the future.
The second argument is the availability of larch itself. The timber merchant indicated that European larch is less readily available than before. The most common larch species in European timber trade is Siberian larch (Larix sibirica), sourced from Russia. Since the EU imposed an import ban on Russian timber in July 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine, availability across Europe has structurally declined.
The choice of Douglas is not a compromise. It is a good timber on technical grounds, with better availability than the alternative.