The 145m tall residential building will be situated along Broad Street, acting as a pinnacle development within an emerging high-rise cluster of towers. Featuring a variety of apartment typologies distributed around a unique 'H' shaped floor plan, this proposal provides a new vertical community with access to stunning city views. Through a high performance concrete cast façade, the building is designed to ensure excellent thermal performance whilst mitigating against overheating and prevailing wind effects to provide refined comfortable and sustainable homes.
The Essington
The Essington
The Essington is a next generation high rise proposal for Birmingham, working with Regal Property Group. It is intended that the 47-storey tower will feature some of the most desirable city centre homes within the city.
Future residents will benefit from a host of active lifestyle spaces, from breakout lounges, community meeting spaces, a gym and cinema to open use work spaces and bookable kitchen/dining rooms all benefitting from the latest in smartphone linked tech. A south facing communal winter garden is also provided within the top floor crown space for residents to enjoy spectacular views, even on the most inclement days. The Essington positively encourages healthy lifestyles of it’s inhabitants with extensive secure personal cycle storage including electric bike & scooter charging points.
Referenced with it’s materiality to Birmingham's legacy of modernist architecture, this building in it's execution employs use of chamfered geometry and splayed reveals to all areas of the facade, which in turn pays homage to the craft and decorative art of this area's industrial fine metal working heritage.
Adam McPartland, Director talks about how the building will interact with the streetscape:
Quote from Adam McPartland
Designed to physically open out onto the street below, the concept for this building started with place-making within the urban realm, with thoughts around lively amenity space spilling out onto an urban pocket park adjacent to the metro stop. This pocket park is a key part of The Essington experience offering pause to Broad Street's bustle, much needed habitat and sustainable drainage opportunities and forging the key access point for a new connection from Broad Street into Ladywood.
The Essington features intelligent engineering to keep homes warm, with insulation levels that far exceed building regulations, bespoke psi values including above market standard air tightness performance to reduce heat losses and a customized g-value specification to the tower’s glass distribution which reduces or utilises solar gain depending on building orientation.
The scheme uses renewable energy to beat carbon emissions with a full life cycle assessment undertaken of embodied carbon in production and transport of materials. Alongside this the building is designed to become zero carbon as the grid decarbonises, with no fossil fuels used in operation. 95% of heat from the building is retained and re-used within the apartments to save energy and apartments are designed to benefit from high levels of natural daylighting, to minimise artificial light use and improve residents’ wellbeing.
The Essington has recently been submitted to Birmingham City Council for full planning approval.