Homemakers Furniture Flagship Showroom

Positioned in the fast-growing Park Place development in Tiffin, Iowa — midway along the I-380 corridor between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City — the new Homemakers Furniture showroom marks the second store for the family-operated Iowa retailer. Conceived as a warm and inviting environment where customers can fully experience Homemakers’ products, the building turns to mass timber to do something a big-box retail shell rarely does: feel domestic at the scale of 220,000 square feet.

The two-story showroom is a hybrid mass timber and steel structure, sitting alongside a larger steel-framed warehouse facility. Its primary structural system features dowel-laminated timber floor and roof panels with glulam beams and HSS steel columns, laid out on a generous 40-foot grid. At the heart of the building, the prominent gabled roof and a central atrium create an open, bright, double-height space framed by 80’-long hybrid timber-steel trusses.

StructureCraft was engaged by general contractor Hansen Company to engineer, supply, fabricate and install the complete timber and steel superstructure, working alongside design architect Gensler, architect of record INVISION, and engineer of record StructureFy. The quick schedule necessitated a turnaround of only 6 months from structural concept to timber's arrival on site.

Structural Design

The showroom’s primary structure is a hybrid timber-steel frame on a 40′ × 40′ column bay. Glulam girders span the full 40 feet between HSS steel columns, with glulam purlins at 20-foot centers carrying the DLT floor and roof panels above. To keep clean lines through the exposed soffit, the girders are upturned into the depth of the DLT so that beam and purlin bottoms align — a flush-framed condition that reads as a continuous timber ceiling. The floor buildup comprises 2x8 DLT panels, acoustic mat, three-inch concrete topping, and a tiled finish; the roof uses lighter 2x6 DLT, sloped throughout to provide drainage and eliminate costly tapered insulation.

Over the central atrium, the building’s signature gabled roof is supported by hybrid timber-steel trusses spanning 80 feet across the double-height space — a structurally efficient combination of timber top chords and steel tension rods that hold the architectural intent while allowing for skylights between each truss pair. Lateral loads are resisted by a combination of precast concrete walls and steel braced frames located at the building’s perimeter. The structure is designed as Type III-B construction.

Long-span timber at a 40-foot bay demands careful attention to floor vibration, and StructureCraft — co-author of the U.S. Mass Timber Floor Vibration Design Guide — calibrated our analysis against our own field-measured data from completed projects to tune the floor system from the outset. We also engineered the bearing connections and erection bracing, coordinating tolerances and details closely with the steel package, so the two trades meet cleanly on site for an efficient build.

The glulam is Spruce-Pine-Fir (SPF), supplied through StructureCraft’s North American timber network and finished with a protective penetrating coat; the DLT is also SPF with a clear sealer, both left exposed throughout the showroom.

Fabrication & Installation

For Homemakers, the DLT panels and glulam members were developed through full LOD 450 fabrication modeling and CNC programming generated via our in-house Branch software, with panelization studied carefully against intermodal shipping constraints so that members and panels pack efficiently into 53-foot containers.

Fabrication is underway now, with timber / steel erection planned for the summer of 2026 and topping out within roughly two months of mobilization (completion September 2026).