A complete external wall insulation solution from Sto is now helping residents at a new luxurious four-star hotel receive a warm welcome. The solution, which includes external wall insulation, render and a special heat-reflecting façade paint, has been installed at the 253-room Park Regis hotel in Birmingham.
“The concrete-framed building was constructed in the 1960s and required a major refurbishment to raise it to the high standards necessary for a four-star hotel,” explains a representative from project architects Building Design Group. “The Sto solution provided the sort of reliable thermal insulation performance we required, and also allowed us to create a striking appearance for the refurbished building.”
“We recommend our StoTherm Classic external wall insulation system for this type of project,” adds Sto’s Technical Consultant, Phil Tye. “Its insulation performance has been proven in many different climates around the world, and it combines an expanded polystyrene (EPS) insulation board with rendering and finish components which are entirely cement-free. This creates market-leading impact resistance which is up to 10 times greater than similar cementitious systems, making it ideal for this type of demanding city centre location.”
“The StoTherm Classic system was finished with Sto’s Stolit K façade render,” adds Steve Baker, Managing Director of Complete Rendering Solutions who completed the installation work for this project. “Stolit is a proven render solution that is designed to work in complete harmony with the other StoTherm Classic components, and certainly helped to make the installation process straightforward.” Stolit offers outstanding excellent adhesion performance with extremely low water absorption, and has a high degree of flexibility which provides exceptional resistance to mechanical damage from thermal stresses.
As the hotel’s exterior appearance uses a striking monochrome colour scheme, the render was then overpainted with Sto’s unique StoColor X-black façade paint, in a dark grey colour. StoColor X-black allows the creation of dark colour render finishes that would be highly impractical using conventional alternatives. “Putting a very dark render finish over external wall insulation is usually impossible as solar gain causes heat build-up in the render,” adds Phil Tye. “The render and insulation can be subject to temperatures of up to 80°C, and that can result in dimensional instability, cracking and even damage some forms of insulation.”
“However, this isn’t a problem with StoColor X-black paint, because it uses special near-infrared black pigments that reflect much of the solar energy in the invisible near-infrared spectrum. Despite the render having a dark coloured surface, it remains considerably cooler than other renders solutions and this provides very effective protection against the extremes of thermal stress.”
The StoColor X-Black paint effectively removes the traditional thermal limits which have prevented the use of dark or intense colour renders in the past. This gives architects far greater design freedom than they have had before, and it also allows them to specify a complete insulation, render and paint solution from one specialist source.