The developer building a private property in the beautiful Kent town of Westerham, near Sevenoaks, has made full use of the flexible version from the Marmox Multiboard range in creating a two storey, drum-shaped elevation that is being finished using a proprietary render system.
THS Homes Ltd. is building the £1.4 million three-bedroom, timber-framed home on a site where a previous dwelling has been demolished, employing high standards of insulation as well as a number of modern construction techniques.
The St. Leonards-on-Sea branch of Parker Building Supplies – a major stockist of Marmox products for wet rooms and other applications – supplied 50 of the 20mm thick, 1250 x 600mm boards to THS, whose own workforce fixed them over timber uprights at 300mm centres, with a Tyvek membrane covering the main structural frame. The six metre high elevation has a radius of eight metres.
The Site Manager for THS Homes, Tom Ellison, commented: “As a small developer working across the South-East we build two or three high specification homes a year, with this one in Westerham likely to go on the market at £1.3 to £1.4 million. For the front elevation where we needed to create the quite tightly curved, rendered wall, we approached Parker Building Supplies as our main merchant. They basically advised us that Multiboard Curved was the only insulation board available which would bend to this sort of radius and offer a suitable substrate for the application of a Weber render system. The boards were easy to cut and fit and have proved ideal for the application.”
The Key Accounts Manager at Parker Building Supplies, Luke Cameron, added: “The group has been stocking Marmox products in select branches – particularly the kitchen and bathroom centres - for two to three years now. The Multiboard backer-board is a very versatile one we keep in stock, and when this inquiry came in the Curved board seemed to offer the ideal solution for the client’s requirements.”
While standard Marmox Multiboards are formed from rigid sheets of extruded polystyrene (XPS) faced on both sides with a layer of polymer modified concrete encapsulating glass fibre reinforcement, the Curved version features 2mm wide slices through 75% of their depth, at 20 mm intervals. This enables the 1250 x 600mm boards to be bent down to radii as tight as 200mm if fixed so that the slices close together. Even tighter radii can be achieved by folding the boards so that the ‘teeth’ open up.
They can either be fixed against a blockwork of other solid surface using a continuous coating of tile cement or secured to timber battens at 300mm centres using screws and the special Marmox washers. This flexibility makes Curved Multiboards ideal for creating archways, curving partitions and cubicles or even moulded tiled seats. The XPS offers thermal conductivity of just 0.034 W/mK and forms a low porosity surface that is pre-primed ready for tiling, plastering or rendering. They present a quick to install, cost effective and very versatile solution for work in bathrooms, wetrooms and exterior applications.
