Elliott House, Edinburgh Student Residencies

Elliott House, Edinburgh Student Residencies

Client: McLaren (Elliott House) Ltd
Architect: 3D Reid Architects
Cost: £6.0m

Elliott House is a £6.0m redevelopment of an existing 7 Storey reinforced concrete framed office building to form a 138 studio student residency building.  The existing site has ramped access down to a rear courtyard and subterranean parking beneath the building footprint.

The refurbishment of the existing building incorporates complete internal strip out, overhaul of building services and cladding removal and replacement, along with the insertion of internal accommodation space within the undercroft, and a layout of residences within the upper storeys.

Structurally, the existing building required investigation to establish the concrete frames condition and adequacy. We instigated a programme of specialist testing and spot sampling to establish the concrete strength, reinforcement cover, and whether the structure was compromised by any recognised symptoms of inadequacy such as carbonation, chlorides and Alkali Silica reaction.

Further to giving the structure a “clean bill of health” structural interventions were applied to accommodate the changes in layout, removal of portions of floor plate, add portions of new build, and provide service penetrations.

A new steel framed rooftop platform and enclosure provides support a new water tank, and other heavy building services plant, and is sensitively clad to obscure from view, and address planning concerns.

The courtyard also has a 2 storey new build mews apartments, forming part of the accommodation.

A substantial existing public sewer passes under the site, and we have secured, through substantial negotiations, acceptance from Scottish Water to build over this, using a piled and bridged substructure to avoid surcharging the existing sewer with the new mews building.

Existing drainage infrastructure was investigated, assessed, and re-used and adapted where necessary using a light touch approach, to provide an economic underground drainage design for the new accommodation.