If A-listed Kinloch Castle on the Isle of Rum is to have a new lease of life providing B&B accommodation for up to 45 plus eleven heritage suites, it must have compliant fire escapes.
It is not always easy to obtain listed building consent for alterations deemed necessary by Building Control; sometimes it is necessary to push the boundaries. At Smith & Garratt we have a range of tools to help us decide what can be done. One such is Sketch-Up, which allows us to model in 3D. Using Sketch-Up we were able to model alterations to an existing first-to-second-floor stair, bringing it down to ground level in different configurations until we were able to demonstrate the pantry below was just capable of accommodating a compliant fire escape stair and final exit door. This innovation helped to save high quality spaces elsewhere.
When we saw a dog-leg stair and a spiral stair would not fit, we built a ‘virtual’ hybrid and adjusted it to provide a way through on the ground floor, a safe start, a safe finish, even gradient and enough headroom at the door behind. Having proven it would work, the dimensions were exported to CAD for production of the drawings for an application for listed building consent … which has been granted.
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Smith & Garratt have acknowledged expertise with heritage property, regularly working on listed buildings and Scheduled Monuments. See some of our previous work.
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