At Brooksby, one of our key areas of work is the manufacture of balconies for high-rise residential developments across the UK.
October 29, 2020
At Brooksby, we work with leading architects, developers, and contractors, offering unique slide-on, cantilevered, FlightDeck® balconies which we developed specifically for high-rise residential projects, alongside conventional Bolt-on balconies.
We were looking to secure two large balcony projects. The first, a high-rise building containing 396 build-to-rent homes with 1,000sqm of ground-floor retail space and 1,200sqm earmarked for a GP surgery in Repton Gardens near Wembley Park. The second was an 894 build-to-rent flats at Nine Elms Park in Battersea.
The team wanted to include high-performance fire-resistant Structural Thermal breaks as part of these projects, so they approached Farrat with a view to utilising their recently launched new fire-resistant material – Farrat TBF – the first A2 fire-rated material of its kind on the market.
Brian Kinsella, General Manager at Brooksby said about the new specification: “Despite being listed as exempt within the updated Fire Safety Regulations (Approved Document B – May 2020). We decided to go a step further and introduced the Farrat TBF as a standard detail within our slab interface design to all our live balcony projects.
Main contractors and developers have embraced the enhanced thermal break detail we now propose as part of our FlightDeck® Balcony system.”
Fire resistance has become an increasingly important consideration when it comes to high-rise construction. Farrat TBF is an extremely limited combustibility Structural Thermal Break material designed to maintain full structural integrity in the event of a fire.
Alongside its limited combustibility, the new Farrat TBF material stands alongside the market’s best performing thermal insulators, with high compressive strength and low thermal conductivity – preventing thermal bridges from forming between structural connections and mitigating against the risk of condensation, mold, or corrosion.
The team at Farrat reviewed the balcony connection drawings we supplied to them, then carried out a Finite Element Analysis to assess the thermal performance of the proposed detail to optimise the thickness of the thermal break required.
We were successful in securing both projects with the help of Farrat, and the Nine Elms project is currently in process and the project at Repton Gardens is due to start in the second half of 2020.
You can keep up to date on the progress of these projects by following us on LinkedIn.