AS Colour
AS Colour
Project
Commercial
Location
4B Kakano Road, Whenuapai
Client
AS Colour
Value
$16 Million
Period
14 Months
Consultants
Architects /
Williams Architects
Structural /
Day Consultants
Mechanical /
22 Degrees
Talk about ‘Paint it Black’. Built for apparel company AS Colour, the office part of this 8000m2 warehouse-office combo near Whenuapai includes black structural steel, exposed precast concrete panels, polished concrete floors darkened with a black oxide, black splashbacks, black desktops and black roof panels. The industrial-chic look is rounded out by polished concrete floors, exposed services and minimal wall linings.
Those last two aesthetic choices put the heat on Haydn & Rollett to get the details bang-on. Having all of the services visible, for example, required a tight and tidy layout. Likewise, the amount of exposed precast on display meant any imperfections in the finish would stand out. When some panels arrived on site with blemished faces, a specialist company called Nawkaw was engaged to use corrective concrete staining to put them right. As an additional challenge, some of the precast included grooves to house recessed LED lighting, leaving no room for anything other than a perfect match between neighbouring panels.
To maximize space, the pallet racks are installed nearly to the roof, with the top shelf at 14m high and the rack spacing at an absolute minimum. To ensure the facility maintained functionality, a stringent floor flatness of less than 2mm per metre was specified. This was achieved using a laser screed for the two 3000m2 concrete pours, followed by a level survey (undertaken to the nearest 0.01mm). Any high or low points were then gently ground to achieve the specification. A wire guidance system was also cut into the concrete slab to enable the turret trucks to travel the aisles at this height with only 100mm clearance each side!
The building is also specifically designed to accommodate an automated racking system, designed and supplied by Dematic from Australia. The automated racking systems contains thousands of ‘totes’, each loaded with inventory. The totes are automatically sent to designated packing stations during order processing before travelling to dispatch on a series of lifts and conveyors. A critical time and space saver in today’s ‘war of the warehouses’.
2022 Property Council NZ - Industrial Property, Excellence Award