London’s
Royal Opera House is in the North East corner of Covent Garden and overlooking
the Piazza is a fifth floor decking area of around 600sqm.
For
the last 25 years this was a hardwood deck, but when Stanton Williams
Architects were asked to oversee the redevelopment of this area a new deck was
an integral part of the plan.
Originally
a rest area for staff at the Royal Opera House, the new decking area was to be
re-purposed as part restaurant, part relaxation area, part meeting space and
part open air dance training studio. Clearly the demands upon the new
decked surface were going to be more varied and more extreme than the last 25
years had witnessed, and because it was to become a partly public space there
were additional concerns from a technical and aesthetic perspective.
With all this in mind, outdoor flooring specialists Outdoor Deck Company and Alfresco Floors were asked to consult and,
having examined the site in detail, their recommendation was to retain the
existing joist structure and use their Grad `invisible fixings' deck system to provide a new treated softwood surface.
The extremely low build up height of the Grad system also meant that the
Outdoor Deck Company could install all the rails, clips and boards onto
these existing joists without much change to the original floor height.
The
Grad system uses a patented clip fixing which locks into specially milled
grooves along the underside of each board, so it leaves no fixings on show
either on the surface or even in the gaps between each board. There are
currently four treated softwoods which are manufactured to fit Grad –
ThermopPine, ThermoAsh, Accoya and Kebony. All these timbers are
specially treated to last at least as long as the old hardwood deck had
survived, but Stanton Williams decided on the rich brown tones of Kebony as
their favourite option, particularly having seen how it eventually weathers
down to a soft silver surface.
Another
advantage that treated softwoods have over hardwoods is that you can rely on
the availability of long length boards. The deck design for Royal Opera
House involved long runs of 3.6m boards either side of a central join, and
because this timber won’t expand or contract very much, the layout was
installed with much tighter gaps than a composite alternative would have
allowed.
The
finished deck is part of a major transformation of the Royal Opera House by
Stanton Williams and has been open to the public from September 2018.
To learn more about the Grad decking system check the websitewebsitewebsite.
