Australian Sustainable Hardwoods (ASH), Australia’s largest hardwood manufacturer, has launched CASE, a new prefabricated hardwood cassette that consolidates structural panel, integrated insulation and finished Tasmanian Oak lining into a single ready-to-install unit for Class 1 walls, floors and ceilings, pulling fibre back from offshore commodity markets to take direct aim at the productivity glass ceiling that has held Australia’s residential build rates flat whilst the country’s timber imports have climbed past $3 billion a year.
Today, Wood Central spoke exclusively to Daniel Wright, Director and National Business Development Manager at ASH, who revealed that CASE routes Australian hardwood fibre once destined for export, pallets or pulp into a structural cassette engineered to strip follow-on trades from the Class 1 site programme and break a productivity floor that has held detached, terrace and townhouse delivery flat whilst commercial mass timber has scaled.
“CASE is the structure and the joinery, tied together in a prefabricated cassette,” Wright said. “It’s a highly attractive structural solution. Walls, floors, roofs. This allows Class 1 buildings to be built fast through MMC, and while reducing the need for other costs, such as follow-on trades.”
Wood Central understands the productivity glass ceiling Wright described comes back to the way Australia’s residential cost stack locks together, with skilled trades, materials supply chains and on-site coordination held in a structure where any single bottleneck holds the others in place. CASE breaks the trade-coordination link by arriving with structure, insulation, and lining already integrated, and by drawing on a parallel pipeline of skilled labour and wood fibre that does not depend on the same supply chains that carry conventional softwood Class 1 builds.
The system uses parallel laminated timber (PLT) hardwood boards, with all fibres aligned along a single axis to maximise strength and stiffness along the load direction. The PLT elements are configured into a box-beam cassette with structural webs, continuous insulation, and Tasmanian Oak lining, precision-manufactured as a single unit and lifted into place in a single operation.
Cross-laminated timber (CLT), the dominant mass timber product globally, alternates grain direction across layers and typically runs on softwood feedstock. ASH’s PLT route, by contrast, delivers more predictable structural behaviour along the load axis, and pulls hardwood fibre that did not make F17 structural grade through parallel lamination and box-beam engineering into a panel that ASH says exceeds what F17 alone can deliver.
The cassette assembly meets the National Construction Code’s energy and thermal performance requirements across Australia’s cool to alpine climate zones, with continuous insulation removing thermal bridging and factory tolerances closing the gap between designed and delivered performance. ASH said interior linings are pre-installed at the factory, stripping plasterboard, follow-on coatings, and finishing trades are removed from the site programme, and the manufacturer’s mass timber experience has shown construction sites running 30 per cent faster once panelised systems take over from stick-build.
“Australia’s Class 1 market has a glass ceiling it just can’t break through, which makes sense when you think about it. All of the skilled trades, materials and supply chains are interconnected. In order for productivity to grow, they all need to grow,” Wright said. “CASE is made using a completely different pipeline of skilled labour and wood fibre. Wood that was otherwise going to export, to pallets, or pulp.”
The CASE concept was developed after years of industry requests to apply ASH’s MASSLAM mass timber success to the residential sector, with Wright pitching the cassette as a parallel rather than a copy of the company’s commercial-scale glulam line.
“The idea for CASE was formed after years of requests to apply our MASSLAM success to Class 1 buildings. It’s a different solution to MASSLAM, but succeeds from the same logic,” Wright said. “Letting the timber do the work of multiple materials on its own, while speeding up construction. It saves cost, time, and labour. All while reducing embodied carbon and increasing the visual appeal.”
It comes as Wood Central reported Australia’s reliance on imported timber has climbed past $3 billion a year, with China alone supplying $1.318 billion or 43.8 per cent of the total, and the gap is driven by state government decisions to cease or limit native forest logging rather than by any decline in the underlying resource base. Wright told Wood Central CASE delivers structure, insulation and finished hardwood lining as a single Class 1 unit — replacing imported softwood with Australian-grown hardwood from the timber that houses the timber.
