Taper Studios, London

Taper’s business services are out of mind for residents upstairs

Delivering air conditioning and ventilation for multiple commercial tenants at the base of a substantial inner-city apartment building calls for clever engineering to ensure that residents living above are not inconvenienced by machine noise.

At the newbuild Taper Building on Long Lane, in London’s trendy Bermondsey, the services are in for the business tenants, and out of mind for the apartment occupants.

Taper Studios is a development of 12 two-storey office units owned by Workspace, catering to small and medium-sized businesses needing between 120m2 and 550m2 in central London.

Kahroon Tanvir, Senior Product Manager for Workspace

Each of the units has its own street access, internal staircase, tea point and toilet. In keeping with other new office projects in Workspace’s London portfolio, Taper Studios features exposed ceiling-mounted services including ducting, ventilation units and fan coil units.

The units are individually served by Daikin Sky Air systems of varying capacity, incorporating R32-based Bluevolution technology. Offices are ventilated by Daikin VAM total heat exchange units which are installed beneath the upstairs ceilings. All these systems were installed by Daikin D1+ Partner, 360 Engineering as part of the project’s Category A fit-out.

Supply ventilation for the VAM units is taken from the courtyard garden, with some complex ductwork to reach the offices.

Katie Floyd, sales director at 360 Engineering, says the challenge was to locate the outdoor units as close to the offices as possible, but without creating an ongoing disturbance – or spoil the outlook – for the residents.

She says: “The solution was to install half the outdoor units at high level in the car park, which is naturally ventilated. Ideally, all the units would have been there, but there was concern that the car park might become unpleasantly hot from discharged heat when all the units were at maximum output in cooling mode. So the other units are out of sight in an adjacent external walkway.”