A Letter from the Developer

For decades, student housing has followed the same playbook. Stack the amenities. Print a brochure. Lease it up. Inside the unit? White walls, eight-foot ceilings, builder-grade everything. The place where students actually live has been treated as the afterthought for so long that the people stopped noticing.

We are building INTRO Columbus because we couldn't stop noticing. 

INTRO Columbus is the tallest mass timber student housing project in the United States, and the first mass timber project of any kind in Columbus. Twelve stories of cross-laminated timber and glulam, at the corner of High and 9th. Wood, instead of steel and concrete, and it isn't hidden behind drywall. It's exposed. You see it. You smell it. The southern yellow pine, right above your head, on every floor.

Mass timber wasn't a change we made late in design. It's where we started. Everything else was built and designed around it. The ceiling heights, the daylight, the way a room feels when you walk in. The reason is biophilia. It is the innate, biologically driven human tendency to seek connections with nature and other living forms. Natural materials in interior spaces lower cortisol, ease tension, sharpen focus, and improve sleep. For a generation carrying more stress than any before them, where you live is doing real work on your nervous system, whether you realize it or not.

Ten-foot ceilings in every unit. The natural light. Roughly three times the personal volume of a traditional dorm. You feel it before you notice it.

And the location matters as much as the building. Right on High Street, steps from OSU, in the most walkable corner of Columbus, where daily life flows without a car. The City and University are at your front doorstep. 

The wood itself is American-grown and milled in Alabama by SmartLam, then assembled right here at 9th and High. The timber will sequester 1,128 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent, leaving the planet better than we found it.

The amenities are excellent. But they aren't the reason we built this. Home is the unit. That's the part we obsessed over.

Live bold. Stay rooted. 

Harbor Bay Ventures