Marsden Brewhouse, Marsden Park
Part of the Laundy Hotel Group, the Marsden Brewhouse is a contemporary family dining, conference and events space and brewery located in Marsden Park. Northrop were engaged to provide civil, electrical and structural engineering services for design and construction of the new venue. The first-floor indoor space needed to be flexible to accommodate small conference groups, as well as provide ample gathering space for large events. We used innovative mixed engineering techniques in our design in order to maximise the flexibility of floor space.
Our structural team designed several two-way spanning steel roof trusses to achieve a 32m x 36m large opening space. We also eliminated all physical braced walls by using free-standing reinforced concrete columns to resist lateral loads. Post-tensioned flat slabs were used to achieve a larger space and reduced structural zone thickness to avoid any potential clashing with mechanical ducts/pipes below. With lightly loaded columns, we substituted in-situ concrete columns with reinforced blockwork columns in order to save formwork and speed up construction.
The civil works consisted of on-grade car parking for 180 spaces and undercroft car parking for 85 spaces with a total pavement area of close to 9000m2 and associated site stormwater. The site stormwater was designed to meet Blacktown Council’s stringent water quality target. The system included stormwater pit filter baskets, a 53kL rainwater tank and a water quality chamber housing 18 cartridges. Some of the challenges the civil design faced were significant level difference on the site from front to rear, a Transgrid easement, ensuring safety of the patrons with vehicular and pedestrian movements through the car park and poor ground conditions requiring improvements to the sub-grade for construction of the pavements.
Our electrical team were tasked with designing a modern lighting scheme to compliment the architecture. The Marsden has its own boutique brewery (producing 10-15,000 barrels of beer a year) and is located in a double-storey high glass enclosure, visible from Richmond Road, and is the focal point of the space. Our intricate lighting design highlighted brewing tanks and equipment with LED feature pendants to add sparkle and warmth to the copper pipes and beer tanks.