The entrance feature as built, and a real photograph of it. This is the element that had to be re-detailed to A2 when the warranty provider called for EWS1, seven months into construction.
The full story
Wagon Lane sits on a parcel of land pinched between the two carriageways of the A45 Coventry Road, just outside Sheldon District Centre on the eastern edge of Birmingham. It had carried a pair of purpose-built 1990s office buildings, long surplus to demand. Elevate Property Group bought the freehold with a Class O prior approval already in hand: consent, under permitted development, to change the two blocks from offices to 64 residential apartments.
That consent fixed the principle and the unit count. It did not make a building. The drawings behind it, prepared by another practice, set out rooms, not a scheme that could be priced, built, warranted and let. Elevate appointed us to take it the rest of the way: to carry full architectural design responsibility, hold the design warranty, and turn a permitted change of use into a finished, lettable product. We were appointed in January 2020, immediately after the prior approval was confirmed, and stayed with the project through technical design and onto site.
Across two blocks with a combined 3,221 square metres, every apartment had to be designed at the room scale: floor plans, bathrooms and kitchens, window and door types, drainage set out, structure coordinated, the fire strategy, and a full specification for construction. The very tight bathrooms, some under two metres wide, could not be finalised until the approved sanitary ware was fixed, because standard fittings varied enough to change the layouts.
Three constraints made this harder than a routine fit-out. First, noise: the A45 carries heavy traffic on both sides of the site, so a planning condition required every habitable-room window to reach a weighted sound reduction of at least 35 dB, with acoustic ventilation to match. Second, fire safety: midway through construction the structural warranty provider called for EWS1 certification, and the post-Grenfell guidance ruled out the cladding substrate already specified. Third, the planning record itself: the consented scheme needed five further applications before it was a workable residential product.
On the outside, we refreshed a tired 1990s office aesthetic without triggering a fresh full application. Working with the client's planning consultant and Birmingham City Council, we secured an external alterations consent for a coordinated palette: the tiled roofs retained, anthracite grey powder-coated aluminium to the window surrounds, soffits, fascias and gutters, tinted grey brick detailing, and a projecting entrance feature with a Pearl Copper reveal. The materials were confirmed through a condition discharge in January 2021.
The cladding change was the one that could not slip. The substrate went from 18mm ply to 9mm Hardie Windbreaker board, the composite panel to 3.0mm powder-coated aluminium on a 25mm Vermiculite support, and the eaves and soffit to Rockclad rated A2-s1,d0. It was re-specified and reissued inside the live programme rather than by stopping it, and the fabric was certified in November 2020.
Then we stayed with it on site, answering requests for information, issuing sketch supplements and detail revisions as conditions were confirmed, and coordinating directly with the employer's agent, BACE Construction Consultants, the structural engineer and the M&E engineer through to the final construction issue in March 2021. Sheldon Court is complete and occupied, let as private rental, with five consents and condition discharges all approved, an external fabric redesigned to pass EWS1 inside a live build, and acoustic glazing that answers one of the noisiest frontages in the city.
