In order to cope with the speed of urbanization around the world especially in areas of high seismicity, researchers and engineers have always been investigating cost-effective building systems with high seismic performance. Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) is a wood based material that is suitable for tall building construction. However, the current CLT system is prone to connection damage in strong earthquakes due to the vast majority of the system ductility resides in connections. One solution is the concept of inter-story isolation to develop a potentially resilient system that can remain damage free during strong earthquakes. A generalized displacement-based design method was developed to design an inter-story isolation system for a tall wood building based on articulated damage expectations. A12-story CLT building with one isolation layer was used to illustrate the proposed design method. The building performance was validated through numerical simulation under different seismic hazard levels.