Signature Care Home, Hindhead

The proposed design of this building was a five storey development of assisted living residential suites for senior citizens, including a self-contained dementia facility.

Innovation Fire Engineering provided flexibility in the fire design, ensuring our client could achieve their aspiration of designing an excellent care home for their residents. Using our innovative, holistic, fire engineering approach, we demonstrated how the fire design could deviate from prescriptive guidance  and allow the flexibility of having bedrooms as inner rooms, furniture within the corridor, a ‘stay put’ evacuation policy and a significant reduction in the number of cross corridor doors. The reduction of cross corridors enhanced the aesthetics of the design and provided our client with the additional benefit of substantial cost savings.

We designed an ‘L5’ fire engineered fire alarm system, to ensure the alarm worked in conjunction with the ‘stay put’ evacuation procedure of evacuating only the occupants in the room of the fire’s origin. The ‘stay-put’ evacuation procedure was proposed in order to facilitate the movement of residents with limited mobility and also reduce disruption in the event of a false alarm.

CFD modelling was used to show that the proposed design offered greater protection than the prescriptive guidance. Innovation Fire Engineering also utilised CFD modelling to optimise the requirements of the hybrid mechanical/ natural smoke control system to meet performance based criteria and reduce the project cost for our client.