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Wizards of Timber: Working Wonders with Wood

Browse Xylotek’s many projects and you’ll encounter a truly eclectic portfolio: from the award-winning ABBA Arena to Jain temple canopies in Gudjarat, alongside a feature CLT staircase for Netflix’s London HQ.

Xylotek work in many capacities: as specialist consultants, subcontractors and sometimes design-build contractors in their own right. The practice was founded by Charley Brentnall with Martin Self and Oscar Emmanuel. They met at Hooke Park – the Architectural Association’s woodland campus in Dorset – and bonded over a desire to take on technically ambitious projects, making a broader use of timber than the norm. Based in Bristol, Xylotek has grown steadily over its half-decade of existence.

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Latest Posts

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13 October 2026

Beyond the drawing board: the practical questions around mass timber

As engineered timber becomes more widely used across Australasia, the industry’s focus is shifting from design possibilities to the harder realities of procurement, cost certainty and getting projects built. The...
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13 October 2026

Rethinking townhouse construction with engineered timber

Townhouses are fast closing the gap with standalone houses in New Zealand’s new-build market. According to Stats NZ, 17,230 townhouses, flats and units were consented in the year to May...
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13 October 2026

University of Toronto wood tower

Pomerleau is delivering preconstruction, value engineering, design-assist, and construction services for the University of Toronto Academic Wood Tower, a 14-storey, 77-metre hybrid steel-and-timber building set to become Canada’s tallest mass...
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13 October 2026

Build together, belong together

Centrumeiland, a reclaimed residential island east of Amsterdam and part of the IJburg expansion, includes social housing built with timber structures and reclaimed-wood façades. Many plots were reserved for private...
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6 October 2026

Building a timber trampoline in the sky!

The Pringle at Assembly Studios near Atlanta is an 82-foot clear-span, 4,000-square-foot bending-active timber gridshell. Its two-layer roof was assembled flat from straight 3-by-3-inch timber laths, lifted in a single...
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6 October 2026

Mass timber solution to Canada’s housing crisis

New study from Perkins&Will offers mass timber solution to Canada’s housing crisis — researchers propose a prefabricated, modular mass-timber system for accelerating housing delivery while supporting the nation’s economy and...
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6 October 2026

Waikato Regional Theatre case study

The Waikato Regional Theatre is an arts-led regeneration project intended to create a civic and cultural hub on Hamilton’s riverfront. Designed as a community and visitor destination, it will combine...
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29 September 2026

Timber engineering of tomorrow

An airship hangar as a blueprint for the timber engineering of tomorrow: it is the gates that make the scale of this structure immediately comprehensible.  But the real highlight of...
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29 September 2026

Go the Swiss!

Bürogebäude Wood in Grenoble — The six-storey timber structure uses columns and beams spaced 4–6 m apart, supported on shallow concrete footings with tie-rods for seismic resistance; the eastern section...
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