At Park House mixed-use development, Oxford Street, London. Shaun Tate, project manager at Mace, reports.
The 152,400m2 Park House development will include office floors and retail spaces, as well as 39 apartments.
As they’re located next to Mayfair, the apartments needed to be of the highest quality with many bespoke features and finishes, so our decision to pre-fabricate the 104 bathrooms, which are all uniquely designed in a range of sizes, raised a lot of eyebrows and is a first in the UK.
Prefabrication is normally only viable when there is significant repetition, which drives efficiency. But at Park House there are only 20 bathrooms that are in any way similar — the rest are unique and include a mixture of powder rooms, single toilet and sink units or bath and shower units.
Working with Swift Horsman and its subcontractors, we were able to achieve economies of scale by constructing the pod frames from the same materials, using the same supplier for all of the vanity units, cupboards and furniture and limiting the palette of materials and finishes. We achieved consistent factory-quality standards and cut out the trades and associated onsite management.
The basic pod frames are built around a hot-rolled and cold-formed steel frame with a calcium sulphate floor that’s glued together to create a very dense monolithic floor construction. Plywood is used to clad the frame, which is then lined with Fermacell board.
The bathrooms were drawn in detail in 3D from the outset, so we knew the location of every single nut, bolt service run and connection point. When the pods came to site everything fitted snugly and all we had to do was connect duct work and plug them into the electrics.
