The Terrace Restaurant
Meeting the brief for this eco friendly restaurant building sited in the park within Lincolns Inn Fields, London, TFCo had the opportunity to really explore the possibilities of combining home grown and recycled timber with sustainable timber based materials within pre fabricated panels. The Douglas fir primary frame was sourced from the UK and flash kilned, planed and oiled prior to installation. The frame is braced where necessary with adjustable stainless steel diagonal tie rods to the walls and ceiling plane. Breathing wall specifications were followed to provide a healthy internal air quality and to safeguard the Warmcel recycled paper insulation. Natural cooling was achieved by cross ventilation via the high quality windows which kept the energy use of the building to a minimum. The standard glazed joinery (supplied by Rationel) and roof glazing units were face fitted to the Douglas fir primary frame within the direct glazing system and folded stainless steel roof finishes by our direct glazing system associates.
Due to the sensitive nature of the site the design brief forbade the use of concrete. We were fortunate to find that just under the subsoil of the building site was a well drained alluvial gravel bed, perfect for the use of a timber crib pad foundation system. Working closely with our associate architect Cameron Scott and structural engineers Andrew Smith and Dr David Yeomans, Andrew suggested a Roman inspired design which worked perfectly. Building in the ground with timber requires good drainage and very durable timber. Greenheart, a tropical hardwood from Guyana, is used along the UK coastline for sea defences, groins, dock timbers and piers for example. It is nearly twice the strength of oak and is classed as highly durable. We sourced reclaimed greenheart from Ashwell’s Timber in large sections, this was re-sawn in the TFCo yard on a mobile mill and provided the timber for the pads and undercroft posts.
The pads sit in cross-frame positions along the parallel trenches, with their connecting undercroft posts clamped in position with a pair of folding wedges enabling height adjustments in-situ to level the Douglas fir floor beams prior to the trenches being back filled with free draining loose stone and tamped. Once these frames were set square and level, the pre fabricated floor panels were lifted into place forming a working deck, with the remaining Douglas fir primary wall and roof frames then raised to the perimeter and above. The sheathed wall and roof panels were then fitted in sequence along with the glass glazing and joinery to form a weather tight shell. The Warmcel insulation was pumped into the panel voids in situ and the exterior cladding, sliding security grills and rainwater goods completed the project.
