There's a lot of money left on the table if you miss a summer at a resort like this. When you compress a construction schedule by using prefabricated wood panel products, it results in real, intended financial benefits.
Project Overview
Speed of construction, reduced building weight, and the cachet of a timber design convinced the owners of Penticton Lakeside Resort to use wood instead of concrete when expanding their waterfront resort. Situated on the south end of Okanagan Lake, an area popular with tourists and locals alike for its recreational activities, wineries and fruit orchards, this six-storey, seventy-unit hotel sets a new standard for the use of mass timber in commercial and hospitality projects. The compromised soil conditions of the floodplain site meant that the reduced weight of mass timber compared to concrete lowered the construction costs significantly. Each floor consists of seventy locally produced cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels, making this the largest mass-timber project in the region.
Wood Use
The exposed timber structure—made of a Douglas-fir glue-laminated timber (glulam) post-and-beam frame with CLT floors, roof, shear walls, stairwells, and stairs—envelops visitors with a sense of warmth and modern rusticity. Glulam was also used to build a dramatic nine-metre-high wall using a double lattice of beams to frame the windows. The floor panels were loaded on the truck at the factory not far from the site and lifted by crane and lowered into place in a single movement. Each floor took an average of one week to install and the entire building was completed in just under a year, in time for the resort’s busy summer season.
