A positive start to 2025

In November 2023’s journal, we featured our then new retrofit project, Claridge House. Well, a little over a year later, and we are now handing the completed project over.

The primary goal of this project at Claridge House was to achieve a Net Zero Carbon Retrofit, aligning with both LETI retrofit guidelines and The Grosvenor Estate’s ambitious environmental objectives. 7,500 sq ft of office space on floors 1 and 2 of Claridge House was converted back to its original residential use, creating eight high-end apartments. This transformative refurbishment project, within a 1920s building in the prestigious Mayfair Conservation Area, was the first such experimental project for The Estate and, despite the challenges of working within an occupied heritage property, it successfully balanced historic preservation with cutting edge sustainability measures.

To deliver a successful Net Zero Retrofit within an occupied heritage property requires total team collaboration, with all parties working together to achieve the key objectives. Disruption, both to the public, local residents within this prestigious area of London and to the other residents occupying the building, needed to be kept to an absolute minimum, with works also adhering to the Borough of Westminster’s guidelines. We were working with a superb team and we think that is reflected in the project.

As the main contractor, we worked to a set of quantifiable KPIs for the project’s performance throughout its entire life cycle. This was a design and build project and so Lee, our retrofit qualified Project Director was instrumental in ensuring that the design brief was fully understood in practical building terms. We worked with specialists in the field to upgrade the fabric of the building first and ensured the necessary time to complete the work was included within the construction programme. It was fundamental to the process to understand that specialists (such as the installer of the Diathonite internal insulation) were provided with the right working conditions to work efficiently and that sufficient time was allowed (in this case to let the product dry between coats in line with the installation requirements). Where delays were encountered, the construction team mitigated them through the resequencing of the work.

Through a thorough understanding of the processes involved, alongside expertise in high end construction, Lee had a practical handle on how all of the processes needed to be ordered to ensure that the project was a success and met all of the targets.