Here at Leonard Design, we appreciate that great architecture doesn’t always have to come at a cost premium, and understanding our clients brief, budgets and product selection can be key to a project’s success.
Leonard Design have been successfully designing and delivering award winning buildings over many years, including Grosvenor House, Waterside Residential Apartments and Nelson Court Student Accommodation, each on their own merits and through different approaches to design and procurement. Many of our projects are worked on from the initial early-stage concept design up until completion. By confirming back, a robust brief, we were able to consider the buildability from the outset. We strongly believe that having the right people on each project, at the right time is of primary importance.
Selecting the right products and utilizing them to their tested potential is a crucial factor in the success of our projects. The examples below demonstrate how each product has been carefully chosen to meet specific site conditions, constraints, and employer requirements. Site-specific factors such as environmental conditions and logistical limitations, play a significant role in determining how our buildings are designed and constructed. These factors often shape the decision-making process for material and product selection, ensuring the final result meets both compliance and client budgets.
Waterside Apartments
Adapting and the re-use of existing buildings can provide their own challenges. The Waterside Apartments is a successful adaptation from dated local authority council offices to high end residential apartments. By re-using the 3 existing cores, however, by also building around them meant that all the additional floor plates created were at a net area gain. Creating small access corridors off the existing cores at the rear of the building and avoiding the traditional approach of splitting the building front to back by introducing a central corridor then ensured that building efficiencies were maximised and provided a large proportion of the apartments with dual aspect views. Adding duplex apartments over the top again maximised the efficiencies, however, didn’t require any extensions to the 3 existing lift cores keeping costs down.
Nelson Court Student Accommodation
Nelson Court is a perfect example of how intricate brick detailing can be achieved without the need for any brick specials or bespoke carrier systems. By researching and understanding the behaviour of particular bricks meant we could carefully select a brick to meet both the crisp design aesthetic, but by also selecting a semi-engineered brick with a high resistance to frost meant that the approved 40mm stepped protrusion could be achieved. In addition to its resilience, the standard brick was finished on 3 faces meaning that additional costs such as ordering specials were avoided. This building has since gone on to achieve a number of awards including the East Midlands Property Dinner Design Excellence 2024 award.
Grosvenor House
Grosvenor House was delivered on behalf of Sheffield City Council for HSBC completed in 2019. 15,000sq.m of high-quality office space built out on local authority budgets to exceptional quality. The success of the project relies heavily on utilizing a 2-stage tender process. Grosvenor House uses the same philosophy as Nelson Court, however, using a completely different façade typology. Working with BAM Construction and their specialist subcontractors early in the design process meant that we could explore and maximise many of the façade components. Reveal depths were achieved by using standard helping hand brackets to their tested limits. Quality of materials, craftsmanship and optimum glazed panes dimensions to limit waste; and by also limiting the width and colour of the terracotta tiles kept costs to minimum. The wrap around terracotta façade uses only 3 panel sizes and 3 colours to the entire façade, yet each elevation has its own unique elegance.
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At Leonard Design, we bring this level of thinking to all of our projects. If you would like any further information on any of the above, or if you have a project that could benefit from some friendly advice, please feel free to contact our team.
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