The Mailbox is Birmingham’s most stylish shopping, lifestyle and restaurant destination, with a variety of exclusive stores including Harvey Nicholls. It is also home to BBC Birmingham.
A decade ago, the team from Car Park Coatings Ltd (CPC) used Deckmaster materials to deliver the distinctive coloured surface coatings that distinguish the three levels and also the ‘yellow brick road’ markers that guide car park users through the large ground level car park to the upper car park areas at the prestigious Mailbox Car Park. These were created using specialist Deckmaster primers blinded with aggregate and sealed, to create coloured safety walkways.
“CPC delivered a great service both in terms of quality of work and value for money. The team responded positively to working around site constraints and assisted with co-ordination of work within a live environment. Very easy to deal with from start to finish.”
Christian Darby
Commercial Manager, DBK Partners Ltd
In more recent years, other specialist contractors have undertaken extensions and alterations to the initial scheme but whilst the work the CPC operatives completed 10 years ago was still performing, the coatings applied by others years later had already failed.
Praise for High Performance Deckmaster Systems
Car Park Operations Manager, Claire O’Connor was delighted to welcome back Car Park Coating Ltd as “their work has proven to be far superior to anything we have had done since they completed the original deck coatings” when it came time to undertake further alterations and improvements to the existing scheme.
Mike Williams, Managing Director of CPC observed that this car park presented a number of challenges both technically and logistically.
Mike says, “It is often the case that the easiest thing to do is to do the job correctly, but sometimes the programme presented by a restricted window of opportunity simply doesn’t allow for all the processes required for a guaranteed job so the temptation is to compromise. That is what others have done and why their coatings failed but we would never compromise on installation requirements and that is why our installation has survived so much longer in this environment.”
Meeting the Challenges
The technical challenges related to finding materials that could bond to a range of existing substrates from highly polished concrete to dimpled asphalt yet cure quickly enough to allow trafficking in the shortest window. Deckmaster products provided the ideal solutions.
The logistical challenges related to undertaking work in a car park that was open 24/7 so could never be closed to allow the works to proceed. The car park also served local hotels and a number of restaurants and a cinema club so regular late night use added a further problem to all of the access and safety issues associated with working whilst surrounded by the public and their vehicles.
To have resolved all of these problems so successfully that the Managing Surveyor representing the Client was able to provide such a glowing reference is high praise indeed for Car Park Coating Ltd.
