What Can You Build With Glulam? 12 Projects That Show What’s Possible

Priors Court is a charity providing education and residential care for autistic young people with complex needs based in Hampshire. The school had invested in a new performing arts centre, and Buckland were involved in creating an external canopy to create a new outside space for the children to enjoy as part of the development.

Made from UK larch, this canopy was a series of posts and beams connected to a central point like a sunburst.

All the glulam was made by us, and the structure was finished with tensile fabric stretched across the top.

We work closely with schools and educational institutions to help increase and optimise their space. Jess picked this project as a highlight of the year for her, as the staff and students were just so delighted with the end result!

Read the Priors Court case study here.

We’ve included The Five Rivers Health & Wellbeing Centre in Salisbury, as it featured a first for glulam in the UK – the first large-scale solar car park to be built with sustainable glulam timber.

At the heart of this project’s sustainability is spruce glulam for the main structural elements. Glulam has minimal environmental impact from production, is highly repairable, and serves as an excellent biofuel at the end of its lifecycle, minimising waste. UK grown larch glulam elements were used for parts of the structure more exposed to weather.

This innovative structure showcases low-energy construction techniques and materials. Generating 186MWh in its first year, it provides 10% of the centre’s electricity, saves £50,000 yearly, and reduces carbon emissions by 36 tonnes in year one – equivalent to planting 600 trees!

Read the Five Rivers case study here.

We’ve included another school project here, but this time to showcase the timber species used, rather than the frame. Ian picked this project to share as it was made from Accoya, and while Accoya isn’t one of the most common timbers used for glulam, being a modified timber, it is increasing in popularity due to its very strong durability credentials.

For this project, the structure was chosen because it was designed to be exposed to the elements as a decorative addition to the new build. The multi-storey glulam pergola which you can see during install here, was connected to a new build school, creating an outdoor space that ran alongside the building to shelter students and provide an impressive visual element.

This was a nice project for us as we always enjoy the opportunity to work with different species of timber.

Read more about common species of timber for glulam.

2025 was a year for artistic installations for Buckland alongside our big projects and house builds. This project was fun to work on because the customer had a real artistic vision rather than a practical one, so we quickly had a clear scope of what was required.

All of our projects are important to the customer, but this was one where they were so passionate about the impact of the artwork, we particularly enjoyed bringing it to life.

This was a large-scale memorial sculpture inspired by the wooden Horsa gliders flown from RAF Harwell during the eve of D‑Day, commemorating the bravery and sacrifice of the 6th Airborne Division, No. 38 Group RAF, and the Glider Pilot Regiment.

Read the War Memorial case study here.

This project was picked by one of our newest members of the team, Dave, because it promises to be pretty visually impressive when it is complete!

South Bend is a new production facility for AR18, best known for its retail work and particularly its joinery, which can be seen in airport shops all over the world. Based near Kings Langley station, this building will be AR18’s new headquarters and is being built to the highest environmental standards – the team is aiming for BREEAM Outstanding certification.

Portal frames have been made in-house from spruce and finished with a single coat of White Remmers. The portals will be interconnected with straight beams and then finished with a CLT roof. We’ll share more of this project when it is completed, but you can read a little more about the plans here.

In the Horniman Museums’ 125th year, they embarked on an ambitious Nature + Love project, which included plans for a new café, play area and toilets near the boating pond in the gardens. Made possible with funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Horniman wanted to become more inclusive and accessible, placing environmental sustainability and a commitment to tackling the climate emergency at its heart.

Rhys picked this project as one of his favourites he worked on last year as it had, as he put it, ‘a cool shape’!

Created with Douglas fir glulam, this design is both simple and complex at the same time, using triangular patterns to cleverly create an intricate pattern with real visual impact.

Read the Horniman Museum case study here.

This project was complex on all levels! The full project was a six-storey timber extension to the original Grade II listed theatre in London, and comprised in excess of 200 glulam beams!

The primary structure is a 19-metre European spruce glulam post-and-beam frame, engineered with bolted connections so it can be disassembled and reused at the end of its life, and it’s safe to say this is one of the largest we have made.

We included this project in our blog as, despite its size and complexity, we were able to deliver the six storey glulam frame along with plywood flooring in just 10 weeks!

Read the Old Vic case study here.

As part of a £9.3m project, this has seen not one but two sites being developed for the York Minster Centre of Excellence: The Heritage Quad and The Works and Technology Hub. The project was underwritten by the York Minster Fund, who led a major fundraising campaign to support this vital project for the future care of the fabric of York Minster.

Keith said this project is one of the most interesting ones for him from last year from an innovation perspective. Originally, the design was a timber deck, and finding the correct material or thickness that would bend and twist into the desired shape was an issue. Extensive prototyping and experimental fabrication techniques perfected the curved timber design, with the most challenging aspect achieving non-planar curves with decreasing radii using plywood sheeting.

We also faced a challenge in balancing architectural ambition with budget realities – working out a design which achieved the architect’s vision of complex curved geometries using straight glulam elements.

Read the York Minster case study here.

This is an extension to a Victorian family home in London. The design is an undulating glulam frame structure, with a spruce glulam structure inside and a UK-grown larch glulam pergola outside. It was designed to be built around an existing wisteria, which they wanted to include as part of the feature.

We included this on our list of projects because, while we love doing large, complex jobs, creating something for a family home is part of what we do regularly, and a glulam extension or new build can create a dream life for someone. We also included this one as we’re pleased to see an increase in the number of projects utilising UK-grown timber – it’s always satisfying to use something locally sourced if we can.

Sophie picked this project as it was a first for Buckland – it was the first glulam project we’ve worked on which isn’t built on dry land!

A true passion project, it is a spruce glulam portal frame for a floating home. We’ve worked with Tig & Coll and Engenuiti on several projects, but this one stood out for obvious reasons. The family had lived on a barge for some time but wanted to expand their existing home to accommodate their family’s needs.

For us, it was a relatively simple project, but it was far more complex from a design point of view: there was no way to crane in a structure, so it had to be created in a modular way for installation and to allow for future maintenance.

Read the Float House case study here.

Designed by Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum, the Serpentine Pavilion 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of this iconic commission.

A Capsule in Time is Tabassum’s first structure built entirely from wood, and it opened in June 2025. The design features four sculptural wooden capsule forms with translucent façades that diffuse and dapple light throughout the space. Built around a semi-mature Ginkgo tree – chosen for its climate resilience – the design blurs the threshold between inside and outside.

This project was made using British-grown larch, an arched structure with domed ends. We designed the connections to be demountable, and one of the central portions of the structure is designed to sit on rollers to allow part of it to be moved. Will was very proud of this structure which is now no longer on display, sadly, we think it’s awaiting a new home!

Read the Serpentine case study here.