“My first memory of wood was of making dens in the garden,” said Edmund Fowles, Founding Director of Feilden Fowles Architects. “Timber is a really accessible material to work with. When you’re an architecture student, you make a lot of models… and I still keep a modest collection of carpentry tools.”
Panellists (from left to right): Sebastian Cox, Lou Davies, Edmund Fowles and Rachel Elliott
He was speaking at the Wood Awards 2025 exhibition, as part of an inspiring panel discussion entitled Timber Inside: Bringing Nature into our Buildings.
Chaired by Sebastian Cox, the Wood Awards’ Lead Furniture & Objects Judge, the panel of designers discussed how timber interiors – from exposed structures to fit-outs and furniture – can connect users to nature and history, in both rural and urban spaces.
Timber at the museum
Timber and stone are the core materials of Feilden Fowles’ Urban Nature Project at the Natural History Museum. The project comprises a new education building and café for the museum’s gardens. It’s one of the select, exceptional timber projects that made it through to this year’s Wood Awards shortlist.
“Timber is a very easy to understand material,” Edmund suggested. “A timber building is a very legible building: you can read the care that has gone into it. When you make an educational building out of timber, the material becomes part of the story.”
The Urban Nature Project at the Natural History Museum; © Jim Stephenson
A sense of calm
Timber and stone are also employed in the Westminster Coroner’s Court extension – another shortlisted Wood Awards building. Lynch Architects designed the extension to the Grade II-listed Victorian Courthouse, and Rachel Elliott, Associate Director at Lynch, told us about the many design considerations attendant on a space in which inquests are conducted, and unexplained deaths are investigated.
“The people using and visiting this building include bereaved family members,” Rachel explained. “The space is also a Designated Disaster Mortuary, which can be called into action at short notice. There will be emotional, sometimes fraught conversations taking place. The use of natural materials – timber internally, with a stone exterior cladding – lends the building calm.”
The new extension employs CLT (cross-laminated timber) to add a sense of tactile warmth to the interior, while wooden timber interior panelling (by Ligno) achieves the high acoustic standard required by the court.
“Although it’s an institutional building, it feels welcoming and peaceful,” Rachel said. “The smell of the timber itself is soothing.”
Inside the new Westminster Coroner’s Court extension; ©Johan Dehlin
Telling a timber story
Legibility is a key part of Box 9 Architects’ work at Denton Hall. They are bringing timber inside a Grade I-listed building as part of its reimagining as a luxury hospitality space.
From the raft of woven heather that embellishes the hall’s ceiling to the magnificent new wooden banqueting table, natural materials are making this grand heritage building into a place to feel at home in.
“The feel of the hall needed to shift – from being a space designed to impress into a space where people feel relaxed, welcome and warm,” explained Lou Davies, Co-Founder of Box 9. “It’s an unconventional renovation; the hall prompts curiosity and wonder when people enter.”
The banqueting table has been shortlisted for the Furniture category in this year’s Wood Awards. Seating ten people, it was manufactured by Ted Jefferis and made from homegrown timber that could not have been more locally sourced – it was built from an oak tree on the estate that was 269 years old, felled in 2008. The client knew exactly where the tree had been felled, and even which saw had been used.
To find out more about these exceptional timber projects, visit the Wood Awards 2025 shortlist. The winners will be announced on 19 November 2025
