88 Cashel Street, City Mall

The new three-storey building at 88 Cashel Street, in the heart of City Mall, has four retail tenancies on the ground floor and offices on the first and second floors. It is constructed from precast concrete panels on two sides with internal insitu concrete shear walls. We used Interspan concrete beams and a concrete topping slab to form the floors to level one, two and the plant room.

The front, rear and west façades feature a variety of claddings, including terracotta and mosaic tiles, folded zinc panels, bespoke polished concrete door jambs and facings, aluminium curtain wall and GRC fins, with eight separate systems on the northern façade alone. We collaborated closely with the wider project team to ensure that all of the finishes were completed to perfection, including the full-height, 300mm thick insitu concrete walls, which have a distinctive rough-sawn board finish.

There was restricted access to the very tight site, with a bustling pedestrian mall at the front, a busy car park at the back, and buildings to either side. The adjacent buildings were so close that the windows had to be installed fully glazed from the inside. The team kept the project on track with a lot of night work, especially after the discovery of archaeological remains threatened the programme.

The time we spent getting the details and methodology right resulted in a premium building that sits beautifully in the high-end commercial, retail and hospitality precinct.