Timber is unquestionably a joy to behold, but as leading architect Timothy Hill told timberDESIGN writer Rilke Muir, it should be marketed less as a material and more as a product.

Described as a ‘family encampment’, the Lake House on the Central Coast of NSW is about maintaining the bush camping experience with minimal impact.

It sits proudly and distinctively among colonial-style weatherboard homes in the Auckland suburb of Mt Eden – a response to the nearby mountain’s dominant presence in the urban landscape.

Cascading down a seaside slope, this simple holiday ‘shack’ fulfilled a surfer’s dream for a haven to wash the salt off after a day relaxing on Victoria’s Surf Coast on the famous Great Ocean Road.

As sculptors of materials, architects often describe wood in terms such as humble, poetic and spiritual. It is this connection to nature that makes the use of wood so appealing, but for some it also provides the dilemma that to obtain wood, trees need to be harvested. Subject specialist Dr Alastair Woodard offers some good advice.

Elsewhere in this edition, Brisbane architect Timothy Hill implores the wood industry to build an “astonishing” all-timber multi-storey building to capture architectural attention and trigger material selection. In Malaysia, an enterprising timber importer has done just that, albeit on a smaller scale.

New Zealand’s first purpose-built green office building is innovative and smart, designed to adapt to its environs and the people who use it.

The pureness of an otherwise laudable desire to create the entire structure of the MADE C Wesley Complex in Mildura using timber sourced from Australia was tempered only by budget and practicality.