“Hats off to Ecobuild, they’ve doubled the floor space and it’s full,” said Warren Dudding, Finnforest UK’s head of consumer and trade marketing.
He was equally impressed by the standard of fellow timber product companies’ stands: “The timber boys have made an effort and are expressing the material very well,” he said.
Finnforest’s own 75m² stand was one of the highlights of the show. It featured a second storey constructed from Kerto-Ripa, the company’s wide span solution for floors and roofs. Attracting significant interest from architects looking to include mezzanine levels in commerical applications such as supermarkets, the raised level structure was 2.5m wide (its maximum width) and spanned 7.5m (it has a maximum span of 18m on a roof and 9m on a floor).
Finnforest has just delivered the system to a timber frame office development in Towcester – its first application in the UK.
Leno, the company’s cross-laminated timber (CLT) product, was also much admired. Finnforest is the only manufacturer that can produce curved CLT and the double-curved wall on the stand demonstrated this to great effect. In this case Leno was finished with a Kerto veneer “for aesthetic appeal”.
Timber and glass facades, the company’s Low-E wall solution, Walksure decking and the SoundBar floor system were also on display.
Business is good across all product ranges, said Mr Dudding. “We’ve just landed three new projects for SoundBar and Leno is about to be used in a very innovative visitor centre in Blackpool,” he said. “It’s going to be a very exciting year.”
