The Italian Restaurant, Pinocchio’s at First Tower had been closed for some time.

The old building was of old, poor quality construction, with several haphazard extensions and some fire damage.

After a period of vacancy, the building was mostly condemned, with only a few walls worth reusing.

The old building façade had some architectural form to it, a stepped gable that hinted at an art deco style, but without committing to it.

MAC architects and Halo Building Developers created a scheme for a new 3-storey residential building housing 8 flats.

The Façade was reimagined into MAC’s beautiful signature modern art-deco inspired style – a massive improvement on the existing frontage while taking some inspiration from it.

The superstructure was built in mass timber – solid timber floors, not joists with gaps between.

This is a sustainable alternative to concrete floors with enough weight for excellent fire and acoustic performance on the separating floors between flats. Mass timber essentially provides the best aspects of timber and concrete, and allows for prefabricated floor and wall elements for ease of construction on site.

This mass timber structure was supplied and designed by a specialist supplier from Poland.

BSC were instrumental in ensuring their superstructure design package achieved local requirements – altering and tailoring their scheme and design package as necessary.

BSC also certified the structure under the SER scheme, providing the local legal design backstop required.

BSC also designed the foundations – which are not suitable for prefabrication. The base soil was loose blown dune sand – the old building did show some signs of subsidence cracking because of this. The new foundations are a wide, and well reinforced raft foundation – spreading the load over the whole building footprint and tying the base into one complete whole to prevent differential settlement & cracking.

Thus, we helped overcome the potential paperwork barriers to enable a sustainable, cost-effective, international prefabricated project.

The result is 8 high quality modern homes. Much more pleasing to the eye, built to a high modern specification.

A happy developer and happy homeowners.