This paper deals with the numerical simulation of mechanical and thermal behaviour of cellular wood material, DendroLight®. The commercial computer code ANSYS is used. DendroLight® is a cellular wood material made of profiled wood boards stacked in layers perpendicular to each other and then sliced once more in plates perpendicularly to the board layers. Gained weight saving of such a solution is approximately 60 % compared to the solid wood, allow to present this type of solution as core structure for sandwich panels in the furniture industry. Complex structure and orthotropic wood mechanical behaviour makes it inconvenient task to model in sufficient detail the core structure by any numerical simulations. Therefore special attention has been devoted to experimental validation of elaborated mechanical and thermal resistance models. Series of coupon scale sandwich panels with DendroLight® core has been tested in bending mode and pure compression. In addition to traditional deformation measuring methods, non-contact optical measuring system ARAMIS has also been employed. In general a good agreement between the finite element simulation and physical experiments has been confirmed. Scatter among acquired experimental and numerical results is within the 20 % margins. Another challenge was to develop a numerical model to be as simple as possible in order to reduce the computer calculation time. Therefore shell elements have been used for wood frame simulation instead of solid elements in ANSYS.