Dilke House

We produced design proposals to meet the client's brief of targeting the high-quality office rental market, providing maximum lettable floor area; rectifying any building fabric issues to reduce future works and maintenance; and mitigating the alternative fire escape route that leads into the adjacent building stair core.

The university required the building to refurbished as quick as possible to bring it back onto the retail market. To be done within a restricted budget, this posed a challenge to ensuring a full high-quality Cat A commercial standard on all floors.

Challenges around the heritage building's age and nature included that minor previous renovations had been undertaken, leading to external fabric defects; and the existing lift being dilapidated, non-compliant for disabled access, with no solid lift shaft, at the centre of the main circulation stair resulting in challenging constructability.

Deploying our optioneering process enabled costs to be focused on reception, cores and share facilities to enhance the entire building aesthetics to the desired high quality. Of benefit when establishing the optimum solution within this constrained environment, we used BIM to assess the existing building and prepare initial 3D proposals for assessing the options with the client.

We deployed our in-house heritage building surveying team to capture all external fabric defects, make recommendations and proposals and cost out the works at the outset to ensure the external fabric works budget was protected. We appointed a lift specialist to collaborate with our team to ensure the new lift and shaft were able to be constructed in the confined space, within budget and timescales.

Working closely with the fire engineer and building control, we inserted fire lobbies and fire compartmentation to the main core to make it a protected means of escape for all seven floors, therefore mitigating the expensive requirement of an external steel escape stair.