Four mass timber modules are taking shape on Red Stag’s factory floor, the first rooms built under the company’s VoMo system, and one of them will be fitted out in full as a premium hotel room for inspection by an internationally recognised hotel operator. That is according to Jason Cordes, Managing Director of Red Stag Investments, who confirmed the milestone on Wednesday as the four modules came together into a demonstration building.
“The future of construction isn’t just being designed differently, it is being manufactured differently,” Cordes said, with a single production line at the group’s European partner already completing more than eight finished modules a day, the output the New Zealand operation wants to match.
Adapting the system for local conditions has taken more than a licence, with structural practice Dunning Thornton engineering the modules for New Zealand’s seismic zones and Marshall Day Acoustics designing sound insulation to exceed STC 65 and IIC 65 ratings. Inside each room, the timber ceiling and nearly half of the internal walls remain exposed, a finish Cordes said creates warm, natural spaces without sacrificing the quality, repeatability, and speed of factory manufacture.
The know-how behind the line comes from Kaufmann Bausysteme, the Austrian firm that developed VoMo with Red Stag TimberLab and stacked 470 fully fitted timber modules into the German Bundestag’s Berlin offices in just 15 months. Founded as a Vorarlberg carpentry business in 1952 and run by third-generation Managing Director Christian Kaufmann, Wood Central understands that the firm turns out more than 2,000 modules a year from its main line at Kalwang in Styria and satellite plants in Berlin and Rostock.
It comes as Agriculture and Forestry Minister Todd McClay committed NZ$3.2 million in Crown funding over three years to the $8 million feasibility study the Government backed in June, testing whether fully fitted modules can be produced onshore for New Zealand and, potentially, Australia. McClay’s announcement claims that converting industrial-grade logs into hotels, student housing, apartments, and offices would leave every log worth 6.7 times more.
Under the VoMo system, CLT modules leave the factory with the fit-out already inside, a format Red Stag TimberLab claims can cut construction time by up to 50 per cent across hotels, student accommodation, aged care, apartments, and commercial buildings. It belongs to Timberlab 2.0, the standardised product family launched alongside the company’s Glulam 2.0 and BIGSpan Industrial systems.
Red Stag brings the raw scale, running the Southern Hemisphere’s largest structural sawmill and the country’s only cross-laminated timber factory at Rotorua, and processing more than 600,000 cubic metres of radiata pine and Douglas-fir a year.
Any exports shipped across the Tasman would enter a market buying prefabricated buildings at a record pace, with Australian imports of prefab and modular buildings reaching $326.4 million in the year to November 2025, up 51.1 per cent on the previous 12 months and mostly shipped from China and the Baltic states.
More than 80 completed projects and 15,000 delivered modules later, Kaufmann has proven the system on a European scale, and the four rooms now standing on the factory floor are Red Stag’s first move to repeat the arithmetic in radiata pine.
