This new development of luxury residential apartments sits on a prominent junction of Icknield Street and Warestone Lane at the entrance to Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. It was therefore a highly sensitive planning application as the site sits within the Jewellery Quarter Conservation Area. Coinpress Residence is a building that fuses heritage with 21st century living, consisting of 14 luxurious apartments and 1 commercial unit.
St Pauls Associates, the architects for the building owners Engine Brother Capital, had seen Alsecco’s Ecomin 400 system in a recently presented RIBA CPD in 2018 and had used the system on a completed scheme in Digbeth so they were encouraged to propose the system for this new development. A system of this nature utilising clay brick slips adhesively fixed to a mineral wool insulation layer onto an SFS sheathing layer had not been accepted previously in the Jewellery Quarter. However, examples presented by St Pauls of schemes in Birmingham and other cities persuaded the Conservation Planner of its merits.
Looking for something architecturally pleasing on this corner plot with a curved façade and designed with different brick bonds, a linear long format brick format was proposed and Alsecco produced a high quality one metre square build-up panel for the planners to give final approval.
During the construction phase, the appointed main contractor went into administration and the client self-delivered the final stages but throughout this process, WSF Contracts maintained installation of the highest quality, indistinguishable from traditional brickwork. The curves are smooth, the traditional English and stacked bonds are accurate and the pointing extremely neat. One wall was finished in a purple render as the adjoining plot will shortly be built close to this development.
