Why build a wooden house?

The weekend of September 20 took place the Habitat & Bois Fair at the Epinal Congress Center. The living room was already celebrating its ^36th edition, but a fresh wind blowing in allied exhibitors, in a rapidly changing sector. If it is still struggling to attract young apprentices to get started, customers are however more and more attracted by wooden buildings. Why ? The answer is invariable: sustainable development and (or) economies.

Wood

In the first place, wood is a key element in carrying out “ecological works”, to use the term. Lightweight, easily transformable and movable, wood has a low energy cost, while being recyclable. It also fights effectively against greenhouse gases, targets of European and global legislation, by storing CO2. On the other hand, new techniques for preserving materials provide quite remarkable longevity to wooden buildings, effectively defying competition from concrete.

An ecological and economical material

Building in wood is also (above all?) A matter of savings. In addition to a considerably reduced duration of the works compared to the use of traditional materials, wood constitutes an exceptional thermal insulator. It keeps the freshness in summer, and of course the heat in winter. Wood thus insulates twelve times better than concrete, allowing a reduction of nearly a third of the heating bill. It is also an excellent acoustic insulator.

Faced with a worrying environmental future and in a scarcely more encouraging economic context, the wood construction sector is booming, fueled by legislation which promotes the use of this ecological material. 15,000 individual buildings were created in France in 2012; the double is expected for the year 2016. And the market has a very large margin: in France only 11% of single-family houses are entirely built in wood.