Aurora Office Development

Developer Cubex opted for Willmott Dixon’s BREEAM expertise to deliver its BREEAM Outstanding Aurora Office Development at Finzels Reach.

Aurora provides 95,000 square foot of Grade A office space on the Floating Harbour, within a £250m mixed-use regeneration in central Bristol close to Temple Meads railway station and Cabot Circus shopping centre.

This is the first BREEAM 2014 Outstanding rated office outside of London and also our highest ever scoring BREEAM project, achieving a score of 91%.

It has been designed to provide a 37% reduction of carbon emissions and 59% less water demand than a typical office building. A life cycle assessment was also completed which verified the decision to change from a steel to concrete frame, which reduced embodied carbon over the buildings' life cycle of 20%.

Demand was huge, and before we finished work it was 85 per cent let!

High expectations

With sustainability a key part in modern office design, this is the only scheme in the city to meet or exceed the British Council for Office design guide criteria, incorporating the maximum amount of daylight possible uniformly spread throughout the building.

It is also one of only eight BREEAM outstanding offices in the UK. What's more, our team also submitted evidence to American LEED certification and is expecting to garner the Gold award as well as a Platinum WiredScore for connectivity and digital infrastructure. Aurora is also fully compliant with the British Council of Offices (BCO) 2014 specification.

A great place to work

The seven storey Aurora building includes a stunning glass atrium, basement car and bicycle parking and a link to the Grade II listed Generator Building, adjacent. A climate change adaptation and resilience strategy was developed by evaluating the potential effects of climate change and the impact of extreme weather conditions. Consideration was given early in the design phase as to possible uses the office could later provide, such as multi-tenant occupancy, change of use to hotel or residential units.

The LEED and BREEAM awards necessitated logging all aspects of the project with tablet-based software, FieldView. Our team could prove, for example, the insulation in walls was installed as described, that every delivery of concrete was logged and even that the the scaffolding boards were sustainably sourced.

Delighted

Gavin Bridge, Director, Cubex Land:

“I’m delighted that with our solid financial backing we delivered this speculative development encouraged by the fact that Bristol has a shortage of Grade A office space which has already resulted in rental growth."

We worked with a Bristol design team, including architects The Bush Consultancy, Dickson Powell Partnership as quantity surveyors and project managers plus Hydrock Consultants, structural and building performance engineers.

Neal Stephens, managing director of Willmott Dixon in the West:

“This is such an important office for the city’s economy, one that will attract new investment and set the standard for BREEAM Outstanding in a city that was 2015’s European Green Capital. We worked hard to ensure this project benefited the Bristol economy, partnering with local companies and sustaining jobs for local people.”

Low carbon expertise

It’s the latest low carbon milestone for the company that recently completed the UK’s largest non-residential Passivhaus facility, University of Leicester’s Centre for Medicine, and the BREEAM Excellent One Central Square, a grade A 135,000 square foot office development in Cardiff. The company is also working on a facility in Exeter targeting BREEAM Outstanding, a new home for the Met Office’s supercomputer.

Willmott Dixon’s expertise for energy efficient, low carbon properties is seeing the company currently work with the Low Carbon Workplace to deliver a series of low energy offices in London. Also, its Interiors company achieved a BREEAM milestone when it delivered the first non-domestic refurbishment and fit-out to achieve the 2014 BREEAM Excellent rating.