St Andrew’s House

Gedling Homes is a large regional registered provider of housing and care facilities. For St Andrew’s House, one of their key properties, there was a requirement to extend and reconfigure the existing care home, comprising 53 bed-sits and a redundant staff wing, and transform into to an extra care living facility, whilst retaining as many rentable spaces as possible. The existing building was RIBA award winning. Therefore, retaining and improving upon this award-winning design was a key theme for the project. 

Our architecture team developed three core design options along with the collaborative client team. Each involved transforming the singular zone bedsit units into multi-zonal apartments, with separate bedroom, bathroom and living spaces in accordance with Extra Care standards. The most notable alteration was made externally, through the demolition of the redundant staff wing that hid the open aspect of the site from the community.

Reinstating this open space allowed for the inclusion of a sensory garden, which is intended to encourage visitors from the local schools and residential areas to visit and make use of a transformed café and outdoor seating areas, which in turn improved the social interaction with the care residents. 

Having heard of the regulatory and efficiency benefits of delivering a scheme through Building Information Modelling – BIM – our team were able to meet the public-sector requirement for BIM standards, and offered this facility during initial engagement with the client.

The clash detection, scheduling, and drawing output our team achieved through intelligent modelling proved successful in reducing drawing related errors on site and kept the historic information traceable throughout the evolving construction stage.