Residential quarter Franklin in Mannheim

Patios and balconies: Investor decided on wood composite material

Construction started in the spring of 2016. The American forces gave up a total of 5 sites in Mannheim. Investor evohaus GmbH, headed by HANEN architects from Karlsruhe, created the INGENIUM living quarters on the Abraham-Lincoln-Allee, embedded in the Sullivan Park with a size of more than 10 football pitches. This residential area directly next to the centre was devised in such a way that there are only gardens, green areas and footpaths between the buildings. All vehicles are easily accessible underground in the parking arcade. Anything needed on a daily basis is available for residents in the shopping centre ‚Franklin-Mitte‘. Kindergardens and schools, as well as bus stops for public transport, are conveniently and quickly reachable. When it was time to decide on flooring for the patios, balconies and roof gardens for the 100 residential units on four floors, the investor chose wood composite material decks. Franconian producer Naturinform was awarded the contract and they delivered a total of 750 square metres of their ‚Smart’ range in grey to the construction site.

The decks were laid by Grewe Heitmann Garten(t)räume GmbH from Ladenburg. The company, specialist for landscaping, was founded in 2005, and today has 25 employees that implement garden projects ranging from small front gardens to generous parks throughout the Rhine-Neckar area. Originally, HANEN architects had been looking to work with decks from another producer. „But in this project there were balconies and patios that made it impossible, or at least pointless to create a slant,“ says Stefan Krug, construction manager at Grewe Heitmann. With the decks that were intended, you would have had to have a slant of 2 percent, which would have meant that we would have encountered problems with height differences between doors and the facade drains.

Naturinform’s ‚Smart’ on the other hand, requires no slant, as water can run off easily thanks to the slightly curved surface, says the trained landscaper and registered landscape conservationist who has been working in construction and calculation in landscaping for more than 30 years and has been at Grewe Heitmann since 2017. His employees have had longer term experience with ‚wood composite material‘, but they hadn’t worked with ‚Smart’ before, which not only has the ‚zero degree advantage‘, but also a very positive weight. Therefore he could easily win over investor and architect for this deck surface. „Apart from the fact that the surface is curved, meaning that the surface needn’t be laid at a slant, the immensely lighter weight in comparison to concrete slabs for example, was very convincing,“ says Maximilian Roth, who has been construction manager with evohaus since 2015. „And then of course the look and design ofthe wood composite material made it an easy choice for us.“

Thanks to the click-principle for the underlying construction and the simple application onto the stilt support the construction site team coud process the material in a clean a quick manner. 99 percent of the surface were already finished by autumn of last year. A few weeks ago the patio oft he last apartment, that had not been sold by then, received its flooring, although there had already been a decision made for porcelain stoneware, this floor was also covered with Naturinform’s solid decks.