The Student Village at Staffordshire University provides modern accommodation for over 700 students, designed to create a vibrant and safe community on campus.
As Willmott Dixon’s only approved LGSF engineer listed in their Yellow Book of suppliers and specifiers, Design4Structures was appointed to deliver independent design checks and on-site verification. Our role ensured that the light gauge steel framing (LGSF) met the highest standards of safety, buildability, and compliance, supporting a smooth construction process and long-term performance of the accommodation.
Our role combined pre-manufacture design reviews with site-based inspections across the full scope of the LGSF installation, providing Willmott Dixon with confidence that the structural system would perform as intended, reducing the risk of remedials and keeping the programme on track. On site, our inspections focused on critical structural connections and installation details such as wall and floor cassette fixings within the student bedroom blocks, balcony and canopy stub steel installations for shared spaces, staircases, trimmers, roof parapets, balustrades, and lift shaft steelwork integrated into the circulation cores. We also reviewed feature roof elements and the provision of cladding support within the external walls.
Alongside this, we verified that the LGSF system aligned with the project’s fire performance strategy and the manufacturer’s tested details, a particularly important requirement for multi-occupancy student accommodation.