Next month, Nak’azdli Development Corp. (NDC) will unveil its first Timber House — a prefabricated home that combines lumber from local sawmills with an innovative panel system developed by forestry startup Deadwood Innovations. The project shows what’s possible when business and academia work together to tackle Canada’s housing crisis.
While mass timber construction is being fast-tracked for urban towers, regional housing has often been overlooked.
“There’s been a lot of emphasis on large-scale buildings in big cities,” said Owen Miller, CEO and Co-founder of Deadwood Innovations. “Our approach is about using local lumber, resources, and expertise to build sustainable, affordable homes tailored to community and cultural needs.”
The long-term goal: create a regional housing production hub in one of Canada’s largest forestry corridors.
The Timber House project builds on earlier work between NDC and Deadwood to commercialize upgraded lumber from low-value timber and forest residue. Using a heat-based thermochemical process, the partners transform aspen and other low-grade wood into strong, high-quality lumber.
This approach not only creates a local supply chain but also addresses northern B.C.’s pressing need for affordable housing.
To accelerate the project, NDC and Deadwood are working with the University of Northern British Columbia’s Wood Innovation Research Lab, supported by Mitacs, a Canadian innovation organization that connects researchers with industry.
“Housing demand across Canada is real, and everyone is looking for solutions,” said NDC CEO JP Wenger. “This Mitacs-supported research is helping us deliver affordable, sustainable housing.”
Dr. Stephen Lucas, CEO of Mitacs, called Timber House “an important example of Canadian innovation fueled by research talent from our own universities.”
The first Timber House will be built by and for members of the Nak’azdli Whut’en community. Instead of relying on costly dimension lumber, the system uses simple nail-laminated timber panels made from locally milled stud lumber.
The panels — fabricated at Deadwood’s Lumber Upgrader Pilot Plant in Fort St. James — form the floors, walls, and roof. Exposed interior wood creates a warm aesthetic, while prefabrication allows the home to be assembled on-site in just a few days.
“By pre-building panels over the winter in controlled conditions, we can double or triple the number of houses we build each year,” Wenger explained.
Community input shaped the initial Timber House designs, developed with Gehloff Consulting and Prakash Architecture. While the show home features two floors, the model supports everything from compact cabins to large five-bedroom homes.
UNBC researcher Yuming Bai is also creating a digital design tool that automatically generates shop drawings from floor plans, speeding up prefabrication. “My work is about optimizing the design phase to shorten overall construction time,” Bai said.
According to UNBC professor Jianhui Zhou, automation is key: “Smaller companies struggle with the complex design process. By simplifying it, we make prefabrication more accessible and scalable.”
For Zhou, the Timber House is about more than just homes: it’s about revitalizing local sawmills, creating jobs, and delivering housing built to endure harsh northern climates.
“With this demonstration project, we’re proving that prefabrication is feasible, economical, and better suited for remote regions,” Zhou said. “Most importantly, our solution puts local people first.”
Leave a Reply