Wood Awards 2021

The Wood Awards shortlist exhibition is on display in the Building Centre's Platform Gallery from 25 October - 3 December 2021 as part of the World of Wood Festival.

Established in 1971, the Wood Awards is the UK’s premier competition for excellence in architecture and product design in wood. The competition is free to enter and aims to encourage and promote outstanding timber design, craftsmanship and building. With permission from the owner, anyone associated with a building or product completed in the UK in the last two years can enter.

19 structures and 11 product designs have been nominated for the Wood Awards 2021. It is heartening to see such a high level of entries from across the UK, despite the impact of the pandemic on the design industry last year. This year’s call for entries ran from April until June and after so much uncertainty, we were thrilled to receive almost 200 applications. The winners will be announced on 25th November 2021.

Our independent judging panel visits all the shortlisted projects in person, making this a uniquely rigorous competition. We are incredibly grateful to our judges. Without their expertise and dedication, we would not be able to run such a meaningful competition. The Wood Awards is split into two competitions: Buildings and Furniture & Product. The Gold Award is given to the project that the judges deem to be the winner of winners. The Buildings categories will be confirmed in early November. There are two Furniture & Product categories this year: Bespoke and Production. Sadly, we had to postpone the Student Designer category for another year due to the pandemic.

As a not-for-profit competition, the Wood Awards can only happen with collaborative industry sponsorship. We are most thankful to this year’s sponsors as without their support we would not be able to run the competition.