Chelsea Creek

“We had a massive amount of people communicating very regularly and with Sapphire joining the party, they were a very welcome addition to the team.”

“Sapphire were very helpful in addressing the fire-stopping, which had been another significant challenge at the time.”

“Credit to Sapphire for achieving the aesthetic, interfacing with the rest of the project and being an absolute pleasure to work with.”

• Rob Cullen, Project Director at Scott Brownrigg

History

Chelsea Creek, a Berkeley homes project, offers European-style living in Central London. It provides a refreshingly unique urban lifestyle with tree-lined avenues and meandering waterways. Chelsea Creek is an incredibly fashionable waterside development with a perfect combination of style and tranquillity. Sapphire Balconies were commissioned to design and manufacture 183 balconies for this unique project.

Challenge

The façade design of the Chelsea Creek project had 183 balconies of 43 different types. The façade of the building had different exteriors using brick, metal and GRC panels. We had to carefully ensure that the balconies were designed and installed based on the varied façade conditions.

The new glass-fibre reinforced concrete (GRC) fascia supplied to the balconies had wide tolerance, and it was crucial to design fixings to fix the precision-made balconies.

Previous phases of the Chelsea Creek project included spaced-out structural posts with thinner, intermediate infill bars which transfer loads differently from traditional vertical bars. As this phase did not feature the same type of bars, the project had to be designed from scratch.

Further complexity arose when the project had different types of window systems on blocks G & H.

Solution

The team at Sapphire Balconies designed innovative stainless-steel brackets to fix wide tolerance in the new GRC fascia, which had movement tolerance in all directions.

Due to the different style of structural posts included in this phase of the Chelsea Creek project, a new post & rail system was included, comprising a package of prefinished extruded aluminium profiles, easily assembled to provide a robust and attractive balustrade on the project. The post and rail system provides a mechanism to re-introduce glass and vertical bars to balcony designs, whilst also allowing the incorporation of alternative infill materials.

Chelsea Creek used the vertical bar infill post and rail system with a 16 x 16mm profile. This profile fits snuggly into a different base rail from the panel type, and the gaps between the bars can be filled with a VB Infill snap-in extrusion.

For more information on the Post & Rail system, visit our website. link

To manage the balconies adjacent to the doors, our team designed a special door bar detail covering the gap from the decking.