Case Study

Green Tech Building Protected by Award-Winning Sherwin-Williams FIRETEX Range

A new digitally-enhanced smart office building in London has been protected with the award-winning FIRETEX® FX6002 coating from Sherwin-Williams Protective & Marine Coatings.

FIRETEX products protect the UK’s first BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ rated project

Located close to Farringdon Station in Central London, the JJ Mack Building at 33 Charterhouse Street provides ground-floor retail space and world-class, technologically enhanced office facilities with 18,500m² of floor space across ten storeys.

The project was the first in the UK to achieve an ‘Outstanding’ rating under BREEAM, the world’s longest-established and leading scheme for assessing, rating, and certifying building sustainability.

Project developers Helical plc and Ashby Capital began the project with sustainability at the forefront of their planning and were suitably rewarded at the design stage with the BREEAM classification 'Outstanding'.

Passive fire protection experts from Sherwin-Williams worked closely with the main contractor, Mace, and in cooperation with the specialist structural steel supplier, William Hare, to ensure that the 3,000 tons of steelwork was protected in case of fire for either the desired 90 or 120 minutes.

Solution

The fire protection solution for this project involved the use of several products from the Sherwin-Williams FIRETEX® range of intumescent coatings. For the interior steelwork, the specification called for FIRETEXC69 primer, FIRETEX FX6002 intumescent coating, and FIRETEX M71V2 decorative topcoat. Designed for off-site application, this system offers many additional benefits: FIRETEX FX6002 is Certifire-certified, has ETA and CE marks, and can provide up to 2 hours' passive fire protection for the life of the building. The complete system can be applied in-shop, with the primer and intumescent layer offering fast drying for reduced throughput times.

Outcome

The ability of Sherwin-Williams to provide a system that enabled fast throughput in the paint shop ensured that the contractor was able to meet project deadlines. The hard-wearing surface and weather resistance of the intumescent coating ensures minimum transport, stockpiling, and erection damage whilst offering the desired fire protection properties. According to Marios Antoniades, Mace Associate Director - Structures Lead, “For us, having a product that turns up on site as close to how it left the factory was a massive part of the choice. Not only does this save man hours on site repairs, it reduced the amount of paint being used on site thus allowing faster progression of handovers to follow on trades. With more projects now having exposed soffits to reduce carbon footprint, the higher quality finish which can be obtained is something that convinced Mace to use FIRETEX FX6002."