Tallwood 1 at District 56 is a twelve-story mixed-use mass timber building located in Langford, British Columbia, Canada, designed by Design Build Services (DBS), Jack James Architecture, and Aspect Structural Engineers (Figure 1). Tall wood construction is a relatively new typology across North America, and this building is the first structure to be constructed under the British Columbia Building Code’s (BCBC) new Encapsulated Mass Timber Construction (EMTC) provisions, a typology that drastically reduces a building’s structural embodied carbon. EMTC is very similar in limitations and fire requirements to the 2021 IBC Type IV-B construction type. As appropriate to a novel system, the design and construction of this building presented some significant challenges and valuable lessons along the way, with one of the primary challenges being the building’s location: Langford is located in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a region that is among the highest in seismic demand in all of Canada. Tallwood 1 was the tallest steel-timber hybrid structure in Canada when it was completed in 2021.