Residential
Building Safety Belongs On The Critical Path
On new build residential, gateway approvals sit on the critical path rather than beside it. A programme built on optimistic approval timescales will not survive contact with a live scheme, so we plan on realistic ones and tell you early if the dates do not work.
Fire engineering runs alongside the project and cost management from the outset, because the fire strategy drives cores, escape routes and compartmentation. Brought in at technical design, it means reworking decisions already made and paid for.
The golden thread is part of that discipline rather than an exercise at the end. Change control, product evidence and the reasoning behind fire safety decisions get captured as they happen, which is the only way the Gateway 3 pack holds together when it is needed.
Getting The Site Right Before The Design Commits
Residential sites are usually tighter than the scheme wants them to be, and the constraints that bite are rarely structural. Daylight and sunlight shapes the massing and the unit mix. Rights to light determines whether a neighbour can hold you up. Party wall notices and scaffold licences decide when you can realistically start.
Our specialists work those questions together from feasibility. Where their advice pulls in different directions, that gets settled between them first, so you receive one position with the trade-offs explained rather than four reports to reconcile.
Neighbours are handled early and properly. A notice served in good time is a conversation. The same notice served late is leverage, and it usually arrives at the worst possible moment.
The Building After Handover
Buildings outlive developers. Freeholders, RTM companies and managing agents come to us holding an appraisal that identified a problem and then stopped, or one hedged so carefully that nobody can act on it.
We would rather reach a clear view on the external wall and explain what it means for the people living behind it, then see the work through. The same team prices the remediation, prepares the funding evidence, runs the works and issues the EWS1 at the end. Remediation programmes fail in the joins
between advisers far more often than they fail on site.
Occupied blocks make continuity matter more, because residents notice when the surveyor who promised
something in March is no longer on the job in November.