Forests and Wood Use in Bregenzerwald, Austria

On November 18th and 19th 2024, members of MainWood visited different forests and wood processing enterprises in Bregenzerwald. This region in Western Austria is well-known for its architecture and woodcraft with wooden materials. This exemplary area showcases a multitude of special wooden buildings resulting from local and broad wood use expertise revolving around wooden houses, as well as industrial and community buildings.

Bregenzerwald is also famous for its plenter forest management that, simply said,  entails that trees in the forest have different ages, providing constant forest regeneration. This type of management continuously produces timber of large dimensions. Due to the moist climate of the area, these forests have not yet suffered from recent drought events. Silver fir regeneration is abundant in these forests, resulting from the successful balance between harvesting needs and hunting to mitigate browsing which would otherwise suppress natural regeneration. Such approaches are still lacking in many regions of Switzerland and Europe as a whole.

With ca. 35,000 inhabitants, the area harbours several sawmills and wood processing companies, encompassing a complete local wood chain. For example, Markus Faisst from the “Holzwerkstatt” produces high quality furniture exclusively made from local timber from the surrounding plenter forests. Elm, silver fir, maple, Norway spruce, and rippled sycamore are some of the species he uses after several years of natural air drying and subsequent processing of the timber assortments.

The local forest managers showed how they manage the forests under highly fragmented ownership structures with an average parcel size of 1.15 hectares per forest owner. The consequences of fragmented ownership with a broad variety of interests and very small forest allotments were exemplified by the farmer Michael Sutterlüty. He demonstrated the hurdles that must be overcome for negotiating, planning, building and maintaining forest roads for local timber use by the community association. Finally, Johannes and Herrmann Kaufmann, both running architecture offices, gave insights into the bigger scale of companies that are active worldwide with an industrial approach to wooden buildings. They have led the development of numerous industrial wooden buildings across the region and have influenced the positive attitude towards a landscape-friendly and innovative building sector.

These multiple perspectives and scales nicely showed the complexity of wood value chains and provided inspiration for the MainWood team as to how such local wood chains can be successful.

Authors: Frank Krumm, Eugenie Paul-Limoges and the MainWood excursion participants.

Example of a Bregenzerwald plenter forest with abundant natural regeneration.

High quality furniture made from local Bergenzerwald wood.

The MainWood team thanks the hosts in Bregenzerwald for their hospitality!