Hope Street Xchange

Hope Street Xchange is a new commercial development close to the city centre of Sunderland. The design mixes distinctive modern architecture with the sensitive refurbishment of a Grade II listed building to provide a contemporary workspace for a new community of innovation-led businesses.

The tight footprint of the site and the building’s location next to both a busy dual carriage way and a listed building made this an extremely challenging project. Specification of Senior’s PURe^® aluminium windows, with their outstanding thermal and acoustic performance helped to ensure that stringent energy-efficiency targets were met, whilst noise from the nearby main road was kept to a minimum.

Installation of attractive brise soleil shading to the southern entrance helped to minimise solar gain, providing a comfortable internal working environment whilst complementing the building’s striking glazed façade.

As a modern extension to an existing Grade II building, the glazing was required to seamlessly integrate with the existing sandstone rainscreen. The flexibility offered by Senior’s SF52 fully capped, zone drained curtain wall enabled this to be achieved, by allowing the glazing system to be sealed rather than fixed into the neighbouring building.

The Grade II-listed red brick building, was previously home to the Gas Board, but now forms part of a six-storey enterprise and innovation centre operated by Sunderland University. The new facility offers 30 commercial offices, event space, seven workshop spaces, facilities to support start-up businesses and a cafe.