Dock 5 Development, Manchester
Dock 5 from ForLiving, the commercial development arm of social landlord ForViva, is a new riverside apartment complex in Salford, comprised of 394 apartments and townhouses, for private market rent.
Located not far Manchester city centre, Dock 5 offers tenants high quality, spacious, furnished units, an on-site cinema, state-of-the-art gym, free to use workspaces, and numerous green spaces for residents.
The ‘light and spacious’ apartments, feature large windows to ‘maximise the light and highlight the relaxing waterfront and garden views’.
Developed over three phases, the homes in phase one are already available, while phases two and three will be completed by September 2022.
A high-end sustainable homes
Paul Gerrard, Director at ForHousing, said: “Our vision for Dock 5 was a luxurious, high-end, sustainable development, and this heavily influenced our choice of architect, contractor, and building products and material specification.
“ForHousing always strives for quality and delivering an outstanding home environment, and we take a fabric first approach to building. This means we use high quality building envelop products designed to maximise the performance and life span of the building, whilst minimising the need for future maintenance.
“Fabric first has helped reduce Dock 5’s operational and embodied carbon, assisting ForLiving to meet its Net Zero commitment for all our homes by 2050. .
“For ForLiving to be able to achieve this it is now vital that the carbon in our building products and materials is third-party validated.
“On this particular project, because of its size and complexity, it has also been important to find suppliers who are able to produce the quantity of product needed - delivering what we need when we need it.”
Gerrard concluded: “When the incorporation of outside light and space is so intrinsic to the unique character and quality of a building, specifying the right windows at Dock 5 was absolutely crucial to achieving the right internal and external aesthetic.
“We were clear that window performance had to be matched by how they looked inside and out.”
High-specification, Low-Carbon Products
Sonia Travis, Commercial Sales Manager at NorDan UK Ltd said: “Dock 5 was yet another big project for NorDan; 530 double glazed balcony doors and around 900 double glazed fully reversible windows – a total of 4,425 sq meters of glazing.
“Multi-award winning architects Falconer Chester Hall specified NorDan’s NTech TopTech windows and NTech double balcony doors, which achieved the required levels of aesthetics, performance and durability.
“NorDan’s windows and balcony doors feature a thin aluminium cladding on the external surface of the timber, making our windows as sustainable as timber, but with a lifecycle of 60 years minimum. This is twice as long as uPVC windows, significantly reducing the whole lifecycle cost of the building.
“NorDan’s timber absorbs and stores more carbon than it emits during its growth time, making it a natural carbon sink.
“This, combined with our low carbon manufacturing processes, makes NorDan’s products around twice as sustainable as standard composite windows, and are five times more sustainable than aluminium windows.
“The windows and doors installed at Dock 5 deliver a wind resistance of up to 99mph and a u-value of 1.2, while the average winter wind speed in Manchester is 13mph. This level of engineering delivers a warm and comfortable home environment for residents, even in the harshest of conditions, and helps to keep heating bills to a minimum.
“In fact NorDan’s standards are set to Norwegian climatic conditions and building regulations, and therefore meet and far exceed British Standards for weather performance.
“NorDan is currently the only fenestration company in the UK to offer third party assessed Environment Product Declarations (EPD’s) for our entire product range, which gives our customers full carbon transparency on all aspects of our products.”
Travis concluded: “NTech windows and balcony doors also provide a safe home environment. NTech windows have a sophisticated and effective child safety restrictor integrated in the hinges, as well as burglar resistance PAS24:2016, and NTech balcony doors provide burglar resistance with secured by design approval.”
A successful development
Gerrard commented: “ForLiving set the development bar high with Dock 5. The desirability of private developments such as Dock 5 is critical to ForLiving, as the revenue generated contributes to the delivery of much needed, quality social and affordable homes.
“Because of this, and the sought after waterside location, we had ambitious expectations for home quality, aesthetics and sustainability – including minimising the building’s embodied and operational carbon impact.
“I’m proud to say that reality has matched these high expectations, with 394 new homes that offer the luxury of enhanced light and space, thanks in no small part to NorDan’s windows and balcony doors.
“Looking ahead, we’re delighted that, due to their quality, performance and life span, we know that NorDan products at Dock 5 will be delivering maintenance-free warmth and energy efficiency for two full generations of residents to come.
“I can already tell from the completion and occupancy of phase one, that Dock 5 will successfully support our social housing development pipeline, and we look forward to working with NorDan on future developments.”
Developer: ForLiving (Private development arm of ForViva)
Contractor: Bridgestone Construction
Architect: Falconer Chester Hall
Products specified: 4,425 sq meters of product
supplied:
530 Double Glazed Double Balcony Doors
900 Double Glazed TopTech fully reversible windows
Jun 07, 2022
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