
Seal House
Watkins Payne carried out the Independent Design Review role for Seal House, a commercial office development, located in central London.










The Aurora office building in Ealing has been given a whole new lease of life through a meticulous refurbishment process.
To ensure that the costs were within budget, Watkins Payne conducted a detailed survey, which informed the scope of the project and enabled the team to focus on the essential elements to create a fresh, new and modern product within the building.
The scope was then transformed into a set of Employer’s Requirements, and a design and build contract was placed. The new and improved building now features a completely new Category A fit-out across all five floors. Each floor uses an air source VRF heat pump system, which provides optimum comfort, energy efficiency and tenant billing ease.
Furthermore, central plant and building-wide systems have either been replaced or refurbished to provide reliable and efficient services. Finally, new scenic passenger lifts have been installed in the atrium, linking up with the communal breakout space on the ground floor.

Watkins Payne carried out the Independent Design Review role for Seal House, a commercial office development, located in central London.

The building services use a 4-pipe fan coil unit arrangement with various ventilation systems to suit the different use areas. Full building power back-up standby generation, UPS, security and access control and automatic blinds all formed part of the fit-out.

Sustainability is incredibly important for the Client and as such the building is targeting BREEAM ‘Outstanding’, WELL ‘enabled’ Gold, alongside WiredScore Platinum. In addition, the Design for Performance approach is being adopted in order to minimise operational energy and hence carbon emissions.

The building has been transformed to provide a 133 bedroom hotel including car and cycle parking on site.

The Minerva House redevelopment works will include the partial demolition of the existing building and extension comprising of additional upper floors and a new lower ground floor.