This morning we’re meeting with Gary Caulfield with the Stanley Group. The Stanley Group has many sister companies within the entire organization, but they all seem to focus around sustainability. Their Auckland office includes Stanley Construction and Stanley Eco Group. Their other office is in Matamata. That office has three sister companies: Stanley Modular, Stanley Joinery and Stanley Interiors. Gary went over each company and what their primary focus is, but spent the majority of his time focusing on Stanley Eco Group and Stanley Modular. In past 10-12 years, there was a trend of shabby construction quality in the residential sector. Exterior wall insulation wasn’t installed properly, window’s weren’t installed properly and had terrible seals, and eaves were not put on many of the homes. What makes these issues significant is that the contractor also chose not to use treated lumber. Over time, water would seep through the exterior wall and the un-treated lumber would become moist. Wood began to rot over time and now poses a health and safety issue (many of the support columns in the home were beginning to be eaten away by the mold).
With this issue at hand, the Stanley Eco Group has been called in to remediate a significant amount of these homes. In many cases, entire faces of a house would need to be replaced. They saw that as a perfect opportunity to incorporate energy efficient and sustainable features in the walls, such as double pane glass windows (that are properly sealed), eco-friendly insulation and water efficient hose bibs.
Gary then showed us a slideshow of a café project that they constructed at the top of a mountain. After an arsonist set fire to the existing café, the owner needed to provide a temporary café in order to maintain operation for their ski resort (apparently you have to provide shelter for 100 people above a certain elevation, 2,500 meters, I think). They put together this temporary café in just under 6 weeks. While the temporary café was in use, they went to work on the permanent structure. Since this was another of their modular buildings, the entire building was manufactured off-site shipped to the site in sections. Being that the new café was some 2,500 meters up a mountain, they couldn’t use the tradition method for transporting the sections (truck), and, at a cost of $12,000 per day, couldn’t completely rely on a helicopter for transportation. Luckily, for them, the owner of the building was also the owner of that portion of the mountain and had Kat that they could use to drag the section up the mountain over snow. They had a few delays throughout the project due to the winter snows, but got the project done and, I have to admit, is one of the nicest looking café’s I’ve ever seen.
Throughout the presentation, Gary touched on the main benefits of modular construction. Since everything is pre-assembled before it gets erected in its final location, they have very little excess waste. For example, when they are cutting dry wall for a certain interior wall, they’ll use the extra dry wall from where they cut out a window to form the detailed frame for that same window. They have also been able to determine that, as opposed to mounting the wall panels on top of the floor panel, they can mount the floor panel to the wall panels (something I’ve never seen done before) and save a significant amount of materials because the floor panel has a thicker section than the walls.
All in all, it was very informative to hear about modular construction. I’ve heard a bit about it back in Dallas, but there are not many examples of it being used (that I know of at least). It’s pretty cool that it is very prevalent over here and they’re able to find ways to continually improve on the methods.
After our meeting with Gary, we walked over to a development called Iron Bank. This is a pretty cool building that looks like it was a modular building since each floor lie at altering angles of about 5 degrees. Unfortunately, no one from the leasing office was available to give us a tour of the property. It’s a good thing we had Vishal with us though. Being the not-so-shy guy he is, he struck up a conversation with the owner of an Indian restaurant that was on the bottom floor of the development. He was pretty knowledgeable about the project and get us a few tidbits of info. We had all originally thought the building was residential, but it turns out that it is 100% office, with retail on the bottom floor. Floors 1, 2, 3 and half of four are leased up, and floors 5 and 6 are vacant. The extremely cool thing about this building, aside from the look of it, was that it had an automated parking garage (which is becoming more and more popular, especially in Europe). The garage holds 150 cars and goes down 5 stories. The guy showed us how it all worked by pulling his car out of the garage and then back in. It was pretty sweet!
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