In this work, the bearing capacity of laminated timber beams composed of two types of wood with different arrangement of laminae has been compared. Initially, an experiment for determining the Young’s modulus of the two types of wood used to produce the laminated beams has been performed. Theoretical expressions for the effective stiffness of the beams whose cross section is composed of four parts made of two different materials have been derived afterwards. Using the known values for the Young’s moduli for the individual components, effective stiffness of the laminated beams with different arrangement of laminae has been computed. Accuracy of the theoretical model has been assessed using an experiment in which the beams were subjected to a concentrated force at the midspan. By comparing the experimental and computed deflections, it was noticed that the theoretical model describes the actual behavior with insufficient accuracy. It is assumed that this is because (a) the values of the Young’s moduli have not been determined in the standard way (tensile and/or compressive test) and (b) Young’s modulus of wood is significantly higher in tension than in compression. In fact, the arrangement of laminae that results in the highest bearing capacity of the beam is not that where the stiffer wood is at the edges of the cross section, but that where the less stiff wood is subjected to less compression. When laminated beams were tested in a cantilever- beam configuration, creep occurred, which is something that has not been noticed for earlier experiments and could not be explained using the available information.