Working with specialist home technology and automation installers, Pro Install AV, Comelit has supplied its door entry and access control solution to Baylis Old School.
The grade II-listed former school building from the 1960s has undergone a £25m refurbishment into 149 apartments and townhouses in Lambeth, south London. The developer, Henley Homes was responsible for the overall construction, with design from Conran and Partners. Henley opted for Comelit’s analogue two-wire Simplebus product. Visitors call an apartment using one of Comelit’s 316 Touch entrance panels that recently won the Red Dot award for product design. The panel, which includes a seven-inch LCD display, also features an integrated RFID reader that can be activated by residents using proximity fobs.
Bespoke
The installer had precise requirements and created a bespoke solution by specifying a camera normally used on Comelit’s IKALL unit, here housed in a vandal-resistant stainless steel panel. The layout at the Lambeth site allows only one main entrance point, but in all there are 11 blocks of apartments, which share common numbering sequences. The door entry product firm says that their 316 Touch interface allows customisation; this avoids confusion between apartments with similar numbers.
The 316 touchscreen has visual indicators and voice messaging for hearing aid users and it also maximises ease of reading for the visually impaired. There are four call modes: name search, code, alphabetic and button. Facilities managers can upload names via a USB port to maintain the system. Inside the apartments, residents use white Planux touch-sensitive colour monitors, pictured, which are full duplex hands-free units with a 3.5-inch on-screen display. The product also offers back lighting and offers a privacy or doctor function button.
The Baylis Old School site covers 3.2 acres and Comelit’s two-wire Simplebus system allowed the installers to achieve communication with no signal loss over distances of more than 900m between entrance panel and apartment monitor. The installers say this cabling with two un-polarised wires (carrying power and data) in each stretch of the system suited the layout, with courtyards and multiple building risers.
John Line, Business Development Manager at Comelit, said: “Comelit is earning a reputation for working creatively with architects and contributing to sustainable developments. Re-using these architecturally important school buildings rather than knocking them down is a significant green initiative. Our Simplebus system is particularly well-suited to retrofit projects as we can make use of existing cabling, significantly reducing the labour time and cost associated with running new cables.”
