St Dunstans, Woking – Projects

Elliott Wood have been working on a new private rental residential development in Woking in Surrey. A number of different options were discussed for the superstructure such as CLT, pre-fabrication/pds design but ultimately for reasons of flexibility, speed, thermal mass and simple design, an RC frame was adopted.

The detailed design is almost complete and work begun onsite in April 2017.

The client has relied heavily on our years of experience in the design of tall buildings with basements, retail and car parking under. We were able to call on this expertise to realise the amount of car parking spaces and column free areas of retail by coordinating with the architect and client to re-arrange the original car parking and retail setting out.

This eliminated the need for a large number of transfer beams and walls at higher levels. It was not possible to completely remove transfer beams but, by careful and innovative structural design, transfer structures were encapsulated into the proposals without undue impact on the Architects design.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to the structure is the late acquisition of the neighbouring site just after the detailed design had been completed. This led to the client asking for an adjacent ten storey extension to the original ten storey building. Elliott Wood had to adapt the original design in a very short period in order to try to ensure both buildings are constructed together.

The civils input was also challenging, particularly pre-planning. The planners were insistent that the underground drainage design had to be completed to a level approaching RIBA Stage 4 while the rest of the team were still at Stage 3. Our civil engineers skilfully negotiated an approach with the planners whilst trying to predict and interpret the demands of the other members of the design team.