IN Brief:
- Southern Housing has awarded Architectural Decorators a £5.34m principal contractor package covering three residential properties.
- The works cover Aura House, Vivienne House, and 59 Oldridge Road and are classified as fire-prevention installation work.
- Earlier planning approval covers removal of existing cladding and replacement with A1 aluminium panels, brick slips, and aluminium soffits.
Southern Housing has awarded Architectural Decorators Limited a £5.34 million principal contractor package for fire remediation work across three residential properties in south London.
The contract covers Aura House, Vivienne House and 59 Oldridge Road and was published on 28 September. The agreed price is £5,337,323 including VAT, with the procurement classified as fire-prevention installation work.
The award follows an earlier planning process covering external wall alterations across the same group of buildings. Wandsworth Council approved proposals in April 2025 for removal of existing cladding panels and their replacement with aluminium cladding rated A1 for reaction to fire, a Corium brick-slip system and aluminium soffits.
That planning record provides more detail about the physical intervention than the latest contract notice, which identifies the contractor and overall fire remediation scope without publishing a complete construction schedule. Together, however, the two records show the scheme progressing from an approved external wall design into a defined delivery contract.
Fire remediation on occupied residential buildings places a different set of demands on contractors from a straightforward façade replacement. Existing construction has to be opened, inspected and reconciled with survey information while residents, access routes and building services continue to be managed around the works.
The external wall also has to operate as a system rather than a collection of individual products. Panels, insulation, cavity barriers, fire stopping, windows, soffits, interfaces and fixings all influence performance, so a compliant material specification on its own does not remove the need for disciplined installation and inspection.
The approved scheme’s mixture of aluminium cladding, brick slips and aluminium soffits adds several junction types to that task. Different façade materials have distinct movement, fixing and weathering requirements, while transitions between systems must maintain both fire and moisture control. Poorly coordinated interfaces can undermine otherwise compliant products.
Existing buildings bring another complication because drawings and surveys cannot always establish every hidden condition before strip-out begins. Once sections of façade are removed, contractors may encounter substrates, cavity arrangements or previous alterations that differ from the assumptions made during design. Those discoveries have to be managed through controlled design changes rather than informal site fixes.
Quality records therefore become part of the construction output. Photographs, inspection sign-offs, product information and records of concealed work can be as important at handover as the visible façade, particularly where later building owners and managers need evidence of what was installed behind finished surfaces.
The £5.34 million award also indicates the scale that can sit behind a relatively small group of buildings. External wall remediation combines access equipment, specialist labour, replacement façade materials, temporary protection, surveys, design coordination and resident-facing site management, while the work itself must often proceed in constrained urban locations.
Programme planning has to account for those constraints. Scaffold or mast climber installation affects access and security, weather can interrupt exposed façade operations and material deliveries have to be sequenced against limited storage. Internally, any required making good must be coordinated with residents and building management rather than treated as unrestricted construction space.
The gap between planning approval in April 2025 and the September 2026 contract award is also a reminder that remediation projects can carry substantial preconstruction periods. Detailed design, procurement, surveys, access strategy, funding and allocation of risk all have to be resolved before physical replacement work reaches site.
The latest award gives Southern Housing a named principal contractor and a defined contract value, moving the programme beyond planning intent. Architectural Decorators will now have to turn the approved façade strategy into a controlled construction sequence across three separate properties while maintaining consistency between design information and what is discovered as the existing walls are opened.
The success of that process will depend less on the headline material substitution than on the details connecting each element. Fire remediation is ultimately delivered at interfaces — around openings, floor edges, cavity barriers, soffits and changes in façade type — where design assumptions and site workmanship have to remain aligned throughout the programme.
