Belgrove House

Located at the centre of the Knowledge Quarter, Belgrove House is a new build specialised office and laboratory enabled development for the life sciences sector. It is designed to be highly sustainable and an example of how carbon emissions may be reduced in construction, operation, and future refurbishment, including whole-life carbon assessment.

Sustainability is at the heart of the design for Belgrove House. A holistic view of all aspects of the development, from reducing demolition waste of the existing site, through construction material efficiency, energy and resource consumption in operational, and future adaptability for the built asset have all been carefully considered to actively inform the design decisions.

Some examples of these aspects include:

• Continuous monitoring at each stage of design and into construction.

• Circular Economy principles adopted, conserving resources and reducing waste. Reducing carbon emissions during operation – laboratory ventilation diversified to reduce air volumes and right size plant equipment. Innovative heat recovery system extracts heating and coolth energy from the fume cupboard exhaust air which would otherwise be lost. High efficiency air source heat pumps generate all the heating and cooling for the building, resulting in an all-electric, fossil fuel free building with potential to be net zero carbon in operation via green electricity tariffs.

• Distributed perimeter risers minimise services runs and enhance connectivity for fit out. Flat structural soffit simplifies coordination, optimising services routes. Exposed thermal mass reduces diurnal variations in internal temperature, reducing loads on the building systems.

• Façade design optimised for thermal performance, controlling solar gains and providing good levels of daylight into the space. At the higher levels, a double skin façade provides the ability to open up internal office space to the outside world when external conditions are favourable.

Belgrove House is targeting BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ accreditation with a potential score of 93%. The building is also designed to be WELL enabled and aspires to achieve LEED Platinum. The project is using LETI and RIBA benchmarks.