Known as Selfridges, this iconic building forms part of the famous Bullring shopping centre in the heart of Birmingham and wraps around the corner of Moor Street and Park Street.

Originally completed in 2003 making it at the time only the third Selfridges store outside of London, this iconic building underwent a huge façade refurbishment including complete replacement of the outer cladding. As it can be seen, this is no straight forward normal project. It’s numerous curves along with the 15,000 individual anodised aluminium discs makes this project truly unique. Yes, every disc is bespoke and individual to match the curvature of the building at its location. As every disc was removed for refurbishment the disc and its supporting rod where tagged with matching bar codes to ensure they fitted back to where it came from.

Due to the excessive cleaning programme for the building, the original cladding system had suffered with damage from the rope access maintenance team so was in need of replacement before long term damage to the structure was caused. The works had to be completed with all scaffold and site set up removed prior to the start of the Commonwealth Games in 2022.

Due to the curvature of the building, it created many challenges for all of those involved, including special scaffold design and understanding of the building structure classification, it starts as a wall but curves into being a roof!! This meant that any system being applied had to be compliant with regulations associated to walls and flat roofs making the design even more unique.

The scaffold was erected to ensure all areas of the building works could be accessed at any given time to allow the existing cladding to be removed, concrete repairs to be completed, new secret gutter systems to be installed and the new Sika ParexTherm cladding system to be applied. The scaffold on this project was only allowed to be erected and dismantled overnight to reduce the impact on the major routes that surrounded the building and with one of the largest scaffold designs in Europe , this was no easy task.

The client had very strict instructions on impact resistance, maintaining the original design intent and the colour was a must. This led to Sika creating a bespoke system design using a roofing grade insulation board, high impact mesh along with normal mesh and specialist mesh within the SikaGard 675 liquid coating that had to be colour matched to the original project.

Sika where chosen for the supply of the ParexTherm cladding system as it was able to demonstrate compliance with the design brief, match the specified colour and also compliance to legislation was met when it turned from being a wall into a flat roof. On top of this, the ability for Sika to draw on it’s extensive product range for concrete repairs, EPDM’s, sealants, liquid coatings for gutter liners and also flat roofing membranes for the terraced areas meant the main contractor had close to a one stop shop for the external works.