The natural durability of British-grown larch and cedar make them excellent choices for outdoor cladding. Ash, elm and sycamore are beautiful choices for hardwood floors.

The architects decided to keep the six-foot-high brick perimeter walls of the building and combine the existing steel frame with the new timber frame, creating a sheltered courtyard on one side ...

This larch has the advantage of having grown for millennia in a moist, insular climate less unlike our own than that of central Europe, but it, too, has a British enemy lying in wait.