SUPAWOOD WAVE BLADES create an eye-catching suspended central feature, which runs down the main mall of the Hope Island Marketplace on the Gold Coast.
The brief for the designers, CCN Architects was to create an atmosphere in the mall that would be welcoming and resonate the marine environment of the surrounding area. To achieve this, they looked for an adaptable timber product, which could achieve the aesthetics as well as help overcome other obstacles. These obstacles included allowing for integrated lighting, masking service on the ceiling leaving access to them while lowering and breaking up the vast ceiling surface to dampen noise echo in the mall below.
WAVE BLADES met all the variables as they can be tailored exactly to meet the design intent and SUPAWOOD would be there to offer full assistance throughout the project to ensure everything went smoothly.
Hope Island Marketplace is located in the heart of the northern Gold Coast high growth region and offers the local community a progressive retail destination. The centre is positioned among marinas and waterfront homes so it was only natural for the designers to create a theme for the interior that echoed the surrounding environment.
The suspended WAVE BLADES feature set against a black ceiling suggests water flowing down the interior. The feature starts high on one side so it doesn’t obscure the windows of the offices on a mezzanine floor and then slopes down to the entrances of major retail outlets. Additionally, the blades have broken up the vast ceiling surface to help disperse noise from the busy mall below.
This complex design required careful pre-planning and included 128 different blade shapes specifically cut to mask the heavy air-conditioning ducting and other services mounted along the ceiling above. The blades were supplied complete and marked with their order to ensure that the install went smoothly.
The blades are 32mm thick and suspended on an extra robust framing system at 600mm centres. This also allowed for scattered strip lighting to be integrated between the blades.
The WAVE BLADE component of this design weighs approximately 12 ton. With the added framing, weight presented a major problem on site and needed to be watched carefully. However, this did not pose any problems for the SUPAWOOD team – in true SUPAWOOD style, any issue was monitored and overcome quickly.
The use of a durable finish of SUPAFINISH Blackbutt laminate on both sides of the blades ensures low maintenance, longevity and low VOC emissions. The timber finish matching other features in the interior provides a warm welcoming environment to all those who enter the mall.
This project shows how WAVE BLADES can be applied in a complex configuration in a broad open space to aesthetically enhance the interior while addressing underlying requirements.
