New design for community coffee shop project

A little update on the community coffee shop project in Sheffield!

We’re undertaking work for a local charity aiming to provide a warm, safe and welcoming community space. A space that features food and drink at affordable prices, and focuses on accessibility for all customers.

Currently, the building is in a huge state of disrepair and structural failure. As a result the work will involve a full retrofit, stripping back to bare brick and repairing damaged areas.

This is a great opportunity to modernise and improve energy efficiency + the flow and layout. As the property is solid walled, we’re probably looking at breathable cork insulation + lime plaster dry lining upgrades.

Some of the client team found it hard to understand the flat 2D drawings, so we exported the full 3D model from Archicad into a BIMx format that the clients could use. The Clients could then explore the VR model at their own leisure on personal devices. Some of the client team found this really helpful to understand how things fitted together and looked.

Trying to fit in a new commercial staircase to the current regs + a fully accessible toilet have proven to be quite tricky. The issue is they take up a lot of space, therefore reducing the amount of customer seating space. After discussing this with the clients we have agreed a set of updates to make the stairs and accessible toilet fit in better, although it might mean having an intermediate floor in between the Ground and First Floors to make the level and space requirements work better. The updates were agreed with good old fashioned tracing paper and pencil.

We will be updating the design soon to take on board the clients feedback.

Reviewing and amending a scheme is all part of how we do things, so that clients are fully involved, and fully happy with a scheme before the messy building works start.

Watch this space for updates !