Coworth Park specifies Tradical® Hemcrete®

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Limetec® is a registered trademark of Lime Technology

Winter 2010

limetalk

Designed by architects Purcell Miller Tritton LLP, the new spa, which will boast an exciting range of ecology features, is set in the green belt and is being developed from the previous private residence. As an exemplar of new sustainable buildings being pioneered by Purcell Miller Tritton LLP, The Spa at Coworth Park has been designed to blend in with the natural landscape. As such, the new building is part buried into the ground and emerges to the north of the site under a living roof of chamomile, lavender and thyme.

With a desire to only use materials that offer the utmost in sustainability, Purcell Miller Tritton LLP specified Tradical® Hemcrete® for the construction of the outer walls of Coworth Park. Its carbon-negative qualities and high thermal performance, as well as being a natural and sustainable material, are consistent with the overall ethos of the eco-luxury spa.

Specialist contractor Quickseal created the spa’s Tradical® Hemcrete® walls. Cast in situ around the

building’s timber frame, to a thickness of 300mm, it ensures 100mm cover to the framework for optimum thermal performance. The completed walls were then faced with a formulated lime render, also from Lime Technology. This comprises a 15mm thick basecoat of Baumit Fibrous Lightweight Render FL68, ruled flat, grid floated and left to dry fully before a 5mm final coat of Baumit (formulated lime) Render Finish MC55 is applied.

Jeremy Blake, Senior Partner with Purcell Miller Tritton LLP, commented:

“ We’re delighted to have had the opportunity to specify Tradical® Hemcrete®. It is an incredible product and perfect to achieve the sustainable objectives of Coworth Park. It really is unmatched in the market as a mainstream option for affordable, high performance and sustainable construction.”

The Triangle starts on siteWork has started on site at The Triangle in Swindon, a project that will see the construction of 42 new homes designed to meet Level 4 of the Code for Sustainable Homes, with the potential to upgrade to carbon zero status.

The homes, being delivered by Hab Oakus, the joint venture between Kevin McCloud’s company Hab and housing group GreenSquare, are being built using Tradical® Hemcrete® from Lime Technology. The main contractor is Willmott Dixon Housing.

The start on site was marked at a groundbreaking ceremony attended by Housing Minister Grant Shapps, the UK Green Building Council’s Paul King, Jonathon Porritt of Forum for the Future and Kevin McCloud. Rather than the traditional “turning of the sod”, the team instead opted to perform a demonstration of Tradical® Hemcrete®.

Grant Shapps said, “I never thought my first photo call would be hemp,” before reiterating the Government’s continuing commitment to zero carbon housing by 2016. Jonathon Porritt called the project “hugely important,” and acknowledged “the marshalling of passion, commitment and expertise” which has brought the project to this point.

The Triangle has been supported with an investment of around £2.5 million from the Homes and Communities Agency’s National Affordable Housing Programme. It has also been backed by an £840,000 investment from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) Low Carbon Investment Fund.

Coworth Park, the luxury country house hotel and spa in Berkshire, has specified Tradical® Hemcrete®, the innovative hemp and lime thermal walling system from Lime Technology, for The Spa at Coworth Park, an exclusive eco-luxury spa complementing the hotel.

CAT WISE demonstates commercial viability of Tradical® Hemcrete®

Flagship Marks & Spencer store to be Built using Hemclad®

An ambitious project designed by architects Pat Borer and David Lea, the scheme has been funded by a range of organisations and individuals, including an Objective 2 grant from the European Union provided through the Welsh Assembly Government.

CAT was established 36 years ago by Gerard Morgan-Grenville, who in his late thirties, had become increasingly alarmed by his sense that mankind was living beyond the earth’s means. Having visited cultural communities that were exploring the possibility of self-sufficient living and finding none of their efforts very persuasive, he bought a disused slate quarry near Machynlleth in Wales and set about establishing a research centre.

Over the past decade CAT has grown and today employs 90 paid staff and runs three postgraduate courses for architects and environmental engineers as well as offering professional training for installers of photovoltaics and biomass generators. As part of this growth, a new building has been created to house CAT’s educational activities. The £4.5 million Wales Institute for Sustainable Education (WISE) offers 24 en-suite study bedrooms, a

lecture theatre and multiple smaller teaching and research spaces.

The 2,000 sq mtrs CAT WISE building was conceived as an opportunity to use green technologies that currently enjoy only marginal take-up within the construction industry. For this reason Lime Technology’s Tradical® Hemcrete® was a natural choice for creating the buildings’ walls.

With the exception of the lecture theatre, CAT WISE’s primary structure comprises a glue laminated timber frame, infilled with Tradical® Hemcrete® from Lime Technology.

The Tradical® Hemcrete® was spray-applied to a thickness of 500mm around the timber frame by specialist contractor Quickseal. It was then finished externally in a coat of Limetec® hydraulic lime render also supplied by Lime Technology. Specified in a mustard colour, it creates a warm contrast to the dark backdrop of the Welsh forest and surrounding slate.

Now open to students and researchers, the CAT WISE campus is another great example of the commercial viability of environmentally friendly products such as Tradical® Hemcrete®.

Think You Know Tradical® Hemcrete®?Well think again! All of these projects have been built using Tradical® Hemcrete®. From sleek modern homes with crisps white render to a new build traditional manor house with stone cladding and lime mortar to the sympathetic renovation and thermal improvement of a barn. It just goes to show what a highly versatile project Tradical® Hemcrete® really is.

Europe’s leading Eco Centre, CAT (Centre for Alternative Technology), one of the first projects to specify Lime Technology’s Tradical® Hemcrete®, an innovative thermal walling solution comprising hemp and lime, has been officially opened.

A new 195,000 sq ft Marks & Spencer store in Cheshire Oaks is being built using Hemclad®, an innovative pre-fabricated wall panel developed by Lime Technology.

Offering the cost effective and fast track construction credentials associated with offsite construction, its USP is the fact that it offers high levels of insulation, thermal inertia and negative embodied carbon. Each timber cassette panel is filled with Lime Technology’s Tradical® Hemcrete®, a bio-composite material made with hemp with a lime binder.

Lime Technology will provide 226 pre-fabricated panels for the construction of the store’s external walls. The panels will be typically 2.4m high x 4.8m wide and 400mm thick.

Once completed, the store, which has been designed by architects Aukett Fitzroy Robinson and is being built by main contractors Simons Group, will be Marks and Spencer’s largest outside of London and is expected to create more than 350 jobs.

Limetec® hydraulic lime mortar from Lime Technology has been specified for the Pipe Partridge building at Lady Margaret Hall, one of the colleges in the University of Oxford.

Built by main contractor EH Beard, the Pipe Partridge building, made possible through generous donations, features a new lecture theatre, a dining room/meeting rooms, junior common rooms and 64 high quality student rooms, enabling the college to guarantee accommodation for all undergraduate students on the main site for three years.

Lady Margaret Hall was founded in 1878 and is an academic community committed to research and scholarship and to effective, highly personalised teaching and learning for students from all backgrounds. In keeping with

its established roots, the new building features a traditionally designed exterior. For the vast expanses of brick work, traditional lime mortar from Lime Technology was the natural choice.

An environmentally sensitive alternative to cement-based mortar, lime mortar has many desirable characteristics. Its main advantages for many new build projects such as the Pipe Partridge building is that it is flexible, which means it has the ability to accommodate slight movements in the structure caused by settlement or thermal shock, thus eliminating the need for intrusive expansion joints.

As well as this, lime mortar is breathable, helping to create comfortable buildings.

Lime Technology’s lime mortar, Limetec®, offers all the benefits of traditional lime mortar but is produced using modern manufacturing techniques. As well as 25kg bags, it is available in 1 tonne bulk bags or 30 tonne bulk silos. The silo system provides onsite production of mortar, significantly reducing wastage and guaranteeing a correctly proportioned mix every time, as mortar can be produced at the simple touch of a button.

For the construction of the Pipe Partridge building, Lime Technology provided a silo that was refilled by tanker as required to ensure a continuous supply. This ingenious method of onsite material production has helped to ensure that lime mortar, once seen as a traditional, niche material, is now viable for large scale projects.

Limetec® chosen for whitechapel gallery expansion

Lime Mortar specified for Oxford’s latest college building

Designed by Belgian architect Robbrecht en Daem and former Yaya nominee Witherford Watson Mann Architects, the remodeling has unite and preserved two landmark buildings – the gallery and the adjacent Grade II listed library.

In view of the historical significance of the buildings, all new building materials had to be carefully chosen. Lime Technology’s Limetec® hydraulic lime mortar offered the ideal product to match the existing mortar and maintain the building’s integrity.

An environmentally sensitive alternative to cement-based mortar, lime mortar has many desirable characteristics. It is porous and breathable. It is also flexible, which means that it has the ability to accommodate slight movements in a building caused by settlement or thermal shock eliminating the need for intrusive expansion joints.

Almost doubling in size the expanded Whitechapel Gallery includes three new galleries – a Collection, A Commission and an Archive Collection Gallery – an Archive Research Room, an Education and Research Tower for local schools, community groups and a new street facing café and full disabled access to the whole building.

Limetec® hydraulic lime mortar from Lime Technology has been specified for the ambitious £13 million expansion to the Whitechapel Art Gallery in East London.

Limetec® is a registered trademark of Lime Technology

www.limetechnology.co.uk

Lime Technology Limited, Unit 126, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 4SATel: 0845 603 1143 Fax: 0845 634 1560Email: info@limetechnology.co.ukWebsite: www.limetechnology.co.uk

Hemcrete Projects starts work on new homes schemeSpecialist contractor Hemcrete Projects has started work on the creation of Swindon’s first new council home programme for a quarter of a century. The project will see the creation of 12 two and three bed houses and one five bedroom low carbon home.

Designed to meet Level 5 of the Code for Sustainable Homes, the homes are being built using Tradical® Hemcrete® from Lime Technology.

The homes at Lyndhurst Crescent, Swindon have been part funded from a £778,000 grant from the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) following a successful bid from Swindon Borough Council. The scheme has been funded through the Local Authority New Build programme, which is investing nearly £18 million in delivering 270 new council-owned homes across the South West.

The properties will feature a range of energy saving materials including photovoltaic panels for generating electricity, solar panels for pre-heating hot water and a hot water system designed to store water at lower temperatures than standard homes. Tradical® Hemcrete® is being used to create the walls of the homes.

Hemcrete Projects is a contractor that specialises in the delivery of projects using Tradical® Hemcrete®, offering clients a full solution from design through to delivery.

Swindon Borough Council currently owns more than 10,000 properties in the borough, but the Lyndhurst Crescent development will see the first newly-built council homes since the mid 1980s.

Using Tradical® Hemcrete® offered significant benefits including excellent fire resistance, air tightness and low energy costs. The system also provided a very cost effective method of meeting the stringent requirements of Level 5 of the Code for Sustainable Homes.

Hemp Technology is currently completing this year’s harvest of hemp. The first harvest since Lime Technology acquired the business from Hemcore, it marks a significant step in the continued growth of the company.

Over 3,000 acres of hemp has been cut, which had been planted earlier in the year, and the material is now being processed at its factory in Halesworth, Suffolk.

The material will be used as the key ingredient of Lime Technology’s thermal walling solution, Tradical® Hemcrete® and Hemp Technology’s natural fibre insulation, Breathe™.

Managing the hemp growing and processing has provided Lime Technology with greater control over its supply chain and allows it to offer a fully integrated supply from seed to final building to enable the company to provide the highest levels of service, quality and cost effectiveness to its clients.

Hemp harvest marks continued growth

Hemp Technology’s innovative and highly sustainable natural fibre insulation Breathe™, has achieved a Euroclass E classification for reaction to fire, further extending the product’s many desirable properties.

Launched earlier this year, Breathe™ is produced from UK grown hemp and flax and offers a renewable and low-carbon means of insulating lofts, walls and floors. The product has many desirable performance qualities – it has a thermal conductivity of 0.039 W/mK, which boosts thermal comfort by reducing overheating in summer and damping internal temperature fluctuations. It has immense breathability as its hemp fibres can absorb and release moisture without damage or the loss of all important thermal performance.

Suitable for lofts, walls and floors applications, Breathe’s™ semi-rigid batts are available in thicknesses of 50mm, 75mm or 100mm. It comes in standard sizes of 1,200mm x 575mm and 1,200mm x 375mm. For more information visit www.breatheinsulation.com.

Breathe™ natural fibre insulation achieves Euroclass fire rating