A new warehouse built entirely from its own engineered wood products proves just how far mass timber construction has come over the past few years. It comes as Frers Engineered Wood’s ‘Mass Plywood Warehouse’ was recognised with Fast Company’s Innovation by Design 2025 award, highlighting how mass timber can rival concrete and steel in terms of speed, cost, and carbon reductions.
Nestled on the company’s Mill City, Oregon, campus, the facility serves dual roles: it houses 6,000 plywood panels and functions as a live showcase for Freres’s patented Mass Ply Panels (MPP) and Mass Ply Lams (MPL). A 40-by-48-foot structural grid supports four truck loading bays, two tarping stations and an uncluttered interior—an open span typically reserved for tilt-up concrete or steel-frame warehouses.
“Of course, I think wood is one of the most remarkable building materials that we have to build with,” according to Tyler Freres, vice president of sales, who spoke to Fast Company about the warehouse. “Engineered-wood products like those used in the warehouse really expand the scope of sustainable construction.”
Designed by Crow Engineering and constructed by CD Redding Construction, the project relies on prefabricated timber walls and roof elements, which accelerated the schedule by three months and reduced construction costs by 20%. Instead of pouring concrete panels on-site, crews installed factory-built Mass Ply sections in a matter of days—replacing a process that can add weeks to a typical project timeline.
Beyond cost and time, the environmental benefits are enormous.
By substituting steel and concrete with mass timber, Freres avoided 429 metric tons of embodied greenhouse-gas emissions—equivalent to removing more than 300 cars from the road for a year. The company projects a total carbon benefit of 1,539 metric tons, comparable to powering 163 homes for a year.
“As it is now, you only have two opportunities for warehouses: concrete tilt-up construction or pre-engineered metal buildings,” said Kyle Freres, vice president of operations, who spoke after the project’s opening late last year. “There’s been a lot of exploration to see if wood can provide a viable alternative to these methods, and the new mass timber warehouse demonstrates that wood can offer a quicker and more effective means of constructing large-format warehouses.”
Wood Central understands that the warehouse marks Freres’s largest industrial application of its Mass Ply system to date. Earlier deployments included an office pavilion and a university research centre, but neither matched the clear-span scale achieved here.
