PERFECT CURVES

Charles Church at Wellington Gate is a collection of three, four and five-bedroom family homes that feature a highly technical curved ‘room in roof’ system.

Built by Persimmon Homes on a former WWII airfield, close to Wantage in Oxfordshire, one of the highlights of the development is a curved crescent of four-bedroom townhouses. Each of the two and a half storey homes in the terrace feature a panelised ‘room in roof’ system capped off at each end by three-storey traditional truss roof plots which come together seamlessly to further highlight the adaptability of this system with the developer specifying Smartroof as the company to deliver both elements of this bespoke curved roof structure.

A complete roof solution, the Smartroof system is designed to offer housebuilders and developers a solution to exploit a new home’s full potential by creating rooms in roofs. Comprising a series of factory produced panels incorporating insulated roof panels, spandrel wall panels, dormers, roof windows, dummy chimneys, soffit and fascia, it is delivered to site and craned into place. Once in place, the roofs simply require roof tiling. The system has many benefits – less waste, better control of quality, safer to install – and meets the industry’s demand for solutions that allow us to build better quality homes, more efficiently.

One of the challenges at the Wellington Gate development was the curve of terraced townhouses. With each plot offset by approximately 6° this makes the rear approximately 1.7m wider than the front. This relatively small adjustment adds up across six plots to create the curved effect of the townhouses. This would have been very time consuming and a huge technical challenge if built traditionally on-site.

During the design stage of the project Smartroof designers were tasked with adapting the system to suit this unique curved geometry. The architectural design of the plots imitate curvature using angular facets along the party wall intersections. These facets are visible to the eye when close to the building yet provide the illusion of curves from a distance.

Commenting on the bespoke modular roofing system at Wellington Gate, Jamie Bremner, Head of Contracts at Smartroof said: “Working closely with our clients on these complex projects gives us a real sense of achievement and really sets us apart from the rest. The Persimmon Homes and Charles Church teams did a great job building these plots enabling the Smartroof team to really make them shine with a beautiful, curved roof.”

The main challenge was the connection between the spandrels and roof cassettes, for any other build this connection would be a 90° angle however incorporating the curve on plan leads to acute angled connections. This is where Smartroof designers utilise their tailored 3D software to detail the non-standard connections and provide the factory with precision CNC data.

Once designed, Smartroof’s production team used the design exported CNC data to manufacture the precision engineered bespoke system at the company’s offsite fabrication facility in Derbyshire. These increased efforts during the design and production stage lead to a seamless site installation where the Smartroof installers can be oblivious to the curved nature of the build and install the system as normal at the Wantage site.

At a time when housebuilders need to embrace new and faster methods of construction as well as comply with more stringent energy efficiency demands, the offsite fabrication of the roofs at Wellington Gate provided Persimmon Homes with huge benefits in terms of health and safety, speed of construction and quality control. For this bespoke design, it is estimated the Smartroof system saved up to four weeks installation time when compared to using traditional onsite methods of roof construction.

Stuart Faulkner, Commercial Director at Persimmon Homes said: ”The Smartroof system offered airtightness, thermal efficiency and was brilliantly engineered to fit the curved terrace. The townhouses now have a room in roof system, which was installed on site faster, more efficiently and without the hours working at height that is typically the norm with traditional roofing systems.” With the terraced townhouses in Oxfordshire now complete, Smartroof has fabricated and installed a complex and high performance roofing system which has enabled Persmimmon Homes to reduce costs and build times as well as health and safety risks on-site.

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