Laboratory

Jan Vondrák, 8/23

Imagine a world where the materials used to build your house don't travel halfway across the globe. A world where you know the exact forest where the trees were felled to build your home.

Covering one thousand square meters, the new headquarters of Kloboucká Lesní embodies the core ideals of sustainable construction. The building highlights current themes and the potential of eco-friendly building, while calling attention to the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. The Kloboucká Lesní headquarters is not just an administrative base for a progressive company—it is a laboratory. It explores how houses could be built faster, how to work with energy and materials without burdening nature during their manufacture, throughout their lifecycle, or even during their disposal at the end of it. Not a drop of water goes to waste, not a joule of energy is burned in vain, and every experience gained is used for further development.

About two thousand timber-framed buildings are built in the Czech Republic every year, which accounts for roughly a mere half-percent share of the country's total timber production. Our effort is to multiply this tiny amount—to cleverly tap into the potential right in front of us and build houses that are not just ecological in terms of heating savings. We want to step back and look at the timber construction process from a broader perspective, understand its principles and connections, and reassemble it under this new lens.

For Kloboucká Lesní, understanding the processes that follow the initial processing of wood is crucial for the company's future growth. The current scope of their production is rooted in a slogan that describes working with timber as a journey from planting a seed to the final product—a planed board.

Thanks to the experience gained in the laboratory, we want to look further ahead together. The philosophy of sustainability, efficiency, and social responsibility reveals new possibilities and potentials for development. At a time when the construction industry is stalled by bureaucracy, material shortages, and labor scarcity, it is the right moment to start fresh. Ecologically, efficiently, and economically.
Let's capitalize on the experience we've gained and build houses like these!