Staffan Schartner spent thirty years in conventional construction before walking away from steel and concrete entirely — and the decision has taken him from Vienna’s ATP Wien to the Swedish Expo 2020 Committee, and ultimately to a chair at Sweden’s only institution running the full timber value chain within a single academic framework. That is according to Schartner himself, now adjunct professor of timber architecture at Linnaeus University in Växjö and a partner at Stockholm-based Omniplan AB, who will guide Australian delegates through the Sweden leg of the 2026 Wood Central UK–Sweden Study Tour from 9 September.
“Approximately 15 years ago, I got fed up with this, and I’ve been working with sustainable construction since,” he told Wood Central. “That means that when you live in Sweden, you work mainly with timber.”
That decision saw Schartner undertake some of the most interesting timber projects — including a stint at Vienna’s ATP Wien and as head of construction for the Swedish Expo 2020 Committee — through to designing, managing, and developing his own timber buildings. He is now also a partner at Stockholm-based Omniplan AB alongside his academic role.
His position at Linnaeus is funded through The Bridge — the strategic partnership between Södra, IKEA, and the university — and it is housed within the only institution in Sweden where the full timber value chain runs within a single academic framework. “You have the whole value chain from forest plants up to real estate investment — and all the sawmill technology and the construction and everything in between,” he said. “Which makes it a very interesting place to be.”
With approximately 50,000 members, Södra gives forest owners in southern Sweden direct exposure to downstream manufacturing returns — its advanced sawmill capacity feeds a CLT production line, and a biorefinery programme extracts commercial value from lignin and other timber side-streams that most mills discard.
“They also take care of lignin and other substances that we have in the woods,” Schartner told Wood Central — Sweden, he said, is doing “what it does best — taking care of all the side-streams of the products that come from the forest.”
Anchoring the other side of The Bridge is IKEA, whose product design and development arm, based in Älmhult, is within 80km of the Linnaeus campus and holds formal standing within the partnership alongside Södra. “When you put all of that together in one place — the forest, the mill, the factory, the construction and the investment — it really is unlike anything else,” Schartner said.
Schartner carries that logic through the Sweden leg as guide — and it is the same logic that makes Linnaeus unusual: forest, sawmill, factory, construction, and real estate investment operating within a single institutional framework. “I think this is a very good tour because it shows several aspects of timber construction and timber production,” he said.
Stockholm opens with the Wisdome LVL and CLT dome completed by Blumer-Lehmann, an evening session with Susanne Rudenstam, director of construction at Swedish Wood, and Monday visits to Wood City, Cederhusen — four large residential buildings built atop a motorway — and the 79 & Park Hillside apartments. “We will look at a few spectacular buildings — like the West Dome in Stockholm,” Schartner said. “Some of them are rather spectacular.”
Myresjö — widely regarded as the world’s first CAD-connected wall panel manufacturer — anchors two days in the Växjö region, where Vida runs both a volumetric elements plant and an integrated sawmill alongside visits to Södra’s head office and the BoKlok residential village, the Skanska-IKEA benchmark for affordable factory-built housing. “We will look at a couple of the best examples we have in Sweden — the production of CLT and prefabrication of CLT elements, as well as the tools you need to run that kind of factory,” Schartner told Wood Central.
The 2026 Wood Central UK–Sweden Study Tour departs on 9 September, giving 25 delegates direct access to the manufacturers, factories and institutions driving industrialised timber construction in two of the world’s most advanced markets. For more information, visit Wood Central’s booking website.
Friday closes at Derome’s Varberg plant and Södra’s Värö complex, where the cooperative’s integrated sawmill and CLT production line are open to the group, before a final evening in Malmö at P-huset Sege Park — a six-storey timber car park and one of the more striking mass timber applications in European urban infrastructure. “And of course, we will visit my university and look at the academic advances we have — from forestry and sawmill technology through to construction and perhaps also the investment side,” Schartner said.
The Sweden leg follows three days in England, as Wood Central reported, during which delegates visit Vistry Works in Leicester — which runs more than 10,000 homes per year through pre-manufactured 2D structural systems — and Oregon Timber Frame in Derby, which produces 4,000 complete structural platform frames annually.
