The £1.6m deal for ISG in Cardiff will see Offsite Solutions manufacture over 400 bathroom and shower pods for Cardiff Interchange – an £89m mixed-use project for developer Rightacres Property.
The bathrooms and shower rooms for 318 apartments for the private rental sector will be manufactured and fitted out offsite and installed on each floor as the building structure rises.
Offsite Solutions’ new floorless GRP pods allow the bathrooms to be installed directly onto the floor slab to achieve continuous level floors throughout each apartment whilst minimising floor build up for each storey.
Jason Hyett, Director of developers Rightacres Property, said: “We needed little persuading of the advantages of applying offsite construction and a manufacturing process for the bathrooms on this development.
“The floorless option is an innovative solution to ensuring continuous level floors throughout the apartments.
“From our initial factory visit, we were impressed with the way Offsite Solutions approached the design process and their flexibility to accommodate our precise requirements at every stage. The first pods look great and we look forward to all the units being delivered to site later this year.”
Simon Pritchard, Senior Design Manager at ISG said: “Where there is a high degree of repetition in the bathroom layouts, pods are the ideal solution.
“The use of offsite construction reduces the number of fit-out trades on site and gives us the benefit of a much faster build programme.
“We have used Offsite Solutions’ pods on other projects and have found the quality of bathroom manufacture in a factory is consistently improved.”
James Stephens, Managing Director of Offsite Solutions, said: “We have had a lot of interest from build-to-rent developers in our new enhanced GRP bathroom pods.
“We have estimated that GRP pods can reduce maintenance costs by over 50 per cent compared to traditionally built bathrooms.
“The capital costs are around 15 to 20 per cent less than steel-framed bathroom pods. The figures make these new pods a very compelling proposition for developers in the private rental sector.”