Villa Maria Fortitude Valley
The Villa Maria Residential Aged Care Facility project involved the refurbishment and expansion of the existing, heritage listed building, increasing its occupant capacity significantly. The heritage-listed building operated by Catholic Healthcare is key to ensuring the maintained use of Brisbane’s stock of heritage buildings, with this example providing historical importance to Brisbane, and will incorporate residential use as well as the continued use of the onsite chapel building. WalkerBai Consulting were engaged to provide several Performance Based solution as part of the overall fire safety strategy retaining much of the heritage building components, such as the chapel. Other Performance Based aspects of the design relate to the existing building structure, the egress system, the compartmentation strategy as well as the active and passive fire services. This project presented a number of unique fire engineering challenges.