Brimstone wraps Tesco’s lowest-carbon store
The architects at S+SA first saw our Brimstone poplar cladding on the UK’s first net zero McDonald’s. Years later, when tasked with designing Tesco’s lowest-carbon store, they returned to the same material.
The new store is now open in Harrogate. At 3,651 square metres, it represents a significant step up in scale. The superstore is built around an engineered timber structure, with dramatic Y-shaped columns and long-span timber trusses, and wrapped externally in vertical Brimstone poplar cladding.
The project has since been shortlisted for the 2026 Wood Awards. Read more about the project.
We supplied 15,715 linear metres of Brimstone poplar, machined to our VTG6 tongue-and-groove profile and installed vertically to clad approximately 1,600 square metres of the building.
Brimstone poplar starts life in British woodlands before being thermally modified at our sawmill in Royal Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire. The process uses heat to alter the structure of the wood, significantly improving its durability and stability without the use of chemical preservatives. We use the same process for British ash and sycamore.
The result is a durable, stable cladding material with a warm, natural appearance that gradually weathers towards silver-grey.
Poplar is a fast-growing British hardwood, but one that has traditionally had relatively limited use in external construction. Thermal modification changes that. By improving its durability and stability, the process turns an abundant and often overlooked British species into a high-performance cladding material suitable for projects of this scale.
As Stefan Tyrie, our Sales Manager, explains:
“Supplying our award-winning Brimstone poplar to Tesco’s low-carbon concept store in Harrogate shows how far this product has come in ten years. It began as an idea: a way to take non-durable, unstable British wood and make it suitable for outdoor use. It has grown into a product trusted by residential and commercial customers alike.
“We are proud that S+SA Architects, KPS and Tesco chose our timber for this store, and we hope to work on many more projects like it.”
The choice of material is particularly important on a project designed around reducing embodied carbon. One square metre of Brimstone cladding accounts for around 8kg CO2e across its life, compared with 122kg CO2e for brick-faced precast concrete. Across a building of this scale, the difference becomes substantial and demonstrates the role timber can play in reducing the embodied carbon of the next generation of retail buildings.
From the UK’s first net zero McDonald’s to Tesco’s lowest-carbon store, Brimstone continues to demonstrate that British-grown timber can perform on major commercial buildings.
