Thomas Consultants Help Design 'The House of the Future'

Thomas Consultants ae commited to delivering their services in a socially and environmentally responsible way, providing cost effective and quality solutions, and they recently were part of the design team of a pre-fabricated apartment building for Housing NZ.

Housing New Zealand's Clayton Ave apartment complex was finished in just six months, and as Andrew Booker says, "This is housing of the future and it is here, now”, as the three-storey block of units was built in half the time it would ordinarily take.

The build was a first for Housing NZ, which is using prefabricated technology to build warmer, better properties faster, and was built using cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels from Nelson company Xlam, and was entirely prefabricated in a factory and constructed on site.

Booker was also enjoying the "Made in New Zealand" dimension of the Clayton Ave project, and seven other building projects it has underway in Auckland, and he said with much of the building manufactured off site, the CLT structure took just three weeks to be installed on site. "It only required one crane and a small number of people using drills and ladders," he said, minimising the impact on neighbours from the building work, though the finishing took longer.

"Using prefabricated panels means much of the noisy work was already done off site. This is an important factor when building in existing residential areas, such as Otara, so it's much more neighbour-friendly. The new apartment building took less than six months to complete, which is around half the build time of a comparatively sized conventional building, and the complex is more thermally efficient than many of Housing NZ's traditionally built properties. "It's designed to be thermally efficient and will require less energy to heat or cool than a conventionally constructed building," Booker said.

"Housing New Zealand will increasingly look to use these building technologies as a way to deliver healthy, efficient homes more quickly to meet the growing demand for housing," Booker said. The prefabricated building industry is on a high after Housing Minister Phil Twyford identified it as a key player in delivering affordable homes under the government's KiwiBuild plan.

Thomas Consultants’ aim is to be the professional service provider of choice for civil engineering, planning, environmental and property  services,  for local and central government agencies, industry and private clients, in Auckland and beyond, so for more information on environmental consultants, building surveyors and soil testing NZ please go to http://www.thomasconsultants.co.nz .