Hensel Phelps is both the owner and the general contractor on its new corporate headquarters in Loveland, Colorado, a four-story mass timber office building anchoring the Avenue South district, the rebranded Centerra South. Sitting on both sides of the table let the team do something most projects cannot. They issued the mass timber supplier RFP during schematic design and signed a letter of intent in late October 2024, months before construction documents started. Gensler (architect), Hensel Phelps (owner and general contractor), Carpentry Plus (turnkey mass timber and design assist), and KL&A (structural engineer) will talk about what that timing changed. They made the key decisions early and stuck to them: aesthetic, structural framing strategy, and mechanical systems. They ran structural bay studies and then confirmed the true sizes of framing members available and the manufacturer's machine fabrication capabilities before those decisions hardened. They built an in-factory mockup to refine key connections against real fabrication limits, and they ran contractor-led BIM coordination that brought the timber supplier and erector into the model alongside sprinklers, curtain wall, mechanical, and electrical. Their own takeaway: it is never too early to get a mass timber trade partner involved, and on board at the start of design development is ideal, if not sooner.

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