Project Description
Ronald McDonald House is a ‘home away from home’ providing comfort to families of sick children whilst they are being treated at the adjacent Royal Hospital for Sick Children. The building has won multiple award for its design over the years and encompasses bedrooms alongside a large kitchen area where families can prepare meals and socialize.
Whilst generally the design works well the charity felt that the internal reception area lacked warmth and was not the welcoming environment they wanted as a first impression for new arrivals. They wanted to look at ways to make this area more ‘homely’ and create a space where people would feel more comfortable using. The design focused around the use of softer materials, such as timber, as well as incorporating an electric fireplace and comfy seating area with an element of privacy.
As part of the reception refurbishment the office space for staff was reconfigured to one main open plan office space and a secondary finance office. The main office has direct access to the reception area with security of staff paramount particularly given staff members could be lone working in the House.
A new automatic front door was installed and new lines painted on the car parking spaces to replace the metal studs which had proved difficult to see and caused parking spaces to be wasted which was not ideal given the limited parking on the hospital site.
Two bedrooms on the ground floor were also reconfigured and refurbished to turn these into three bedrooms, increasing the total number of bedrooms in the house to 31.
Benefits To Client
- Experience of working in a live environment
- Phased approach to construction to maintain building functionality throughout and minimise disruption
- Experience of working on refurbishment project with unexpected base build issues which had to be managed
Our Role / Scope
Managing the development of the design and tender process. This project was negotiated direct with the preferred contractor with costs agreed and benchmarked by the Quantity Surveyor.
Given the location and nature of the site overall site management was key to the success of this project with daily interaction between the contractor and Client team to ensure continued smooth operation of the House while the works were ongoing and that access was maintained to the main entrance and kitchen which both came directly off the reception area being refurbished.
In order to achieve this a multi phased approach to construction was adopted taking certain areas offline at a time to progress works.
A few unexpected issues were also uncovered with the existing base build which we managed with the design team to ensure the best solution was sought and instructed to allow the construction to continue and overall design ambition maintained