White City Living (Phase One)

Situated opposite the BBC Studios and adjacent to Westfield London Shopping Centre, in the heart of West London is White City, a venture by developers St James. The project designed by Patel Taylor Architects will comprise 1,800 new homes.

Phase One includes three distinct residential buildings known as Bowery (B1), Belvedere Row (B2) and Lincoln (B3) which range between 11 and 22 storeys in height and feature commercial areas on the ground floor. The “£8-billion White City Opportunity Area” will provide private facilities for its residents such as entertainment suites, two 12-seat private cinemas and dining rooms, business lounge, as well as residents’ club with a 24-hour concierge service.

The Penthouse apartments will be situated in Lincoln and Belvedere Row developments; however, smaller apartments will be equipped with Juliette balconies on all elevations of the Bowery building. Inset concrete cladding as well as outset bolt-on balconies will help complete the architect’s vision while maintaining efficient costs.

The primary structure will be formed of reinforced concrete frame with vertical columns which will be located predominantly within the façade, in order to transfer loads down to the foundation. The façade also features large format precast cladding and prefabricated glazing modules up to 4 metres wide, helping to limit onsite installation.

Wintech have worked directly with St James offering their full range of consultancy services from RIBA stage 2 all the way through to RIBA stage 5 with onsite works currently progressing.  These services included value engineering exercises, creation of façade specifications, factory and site visitation, subcontractor design audits and site monitoring.

St James were supported by Wintech’s clear understanding of the façade specification, detailing and product knowledge to mitigate risks and add value throughout the project. Services were primarily needed to ensure compliance of the façade specifications, designs and to ensure products were integrated in line with best practice.

With the façade representing a significant percentage of the overall construction budget Wintech’s expertise provided significant commercial benefits in mitigating these costs to the client by working from the early stages with the design team, this ensured a fully coherent and consistent approach across the development and involved the production of a design as early and coherently as possible to ensure greater cost certainty during tender.

Images courtesy of  St James of Berkeley Group