Details

February 2000's Building Homes covered the William Sutton Trust’s Stevenage semis in some detail, but one detail of the innovative houses deserves a closer look: the use of suspended ceilings. They are commonplace in office and commercial environments but still most unusual in housing, although occasionally seen in flats as a means of improving the sound attenuation between floors. However architect Stephen Bates of Sergison Bates was not concerned, in this instance, with the passage of sound: rather he specified the suspended ceilings to get the proportions of the rooms right.

That is not a flight of fancy on the part of Bates. It is an important design consideration when looking at ways of using the roofspace. In a typical room-in-the-roof scenario, the whole upper floor is opened up to the underside of the rafters. However there are many situations - and the William Sutton Trust homes are one - where this would give you unpleasantly tall room spaces. If there is a standard detail for dealing with this it is to build a roof with a raised tie truss that provides a flat ceiling at a more manageable height. But the Stevenage homes used Fillcrete’s Tradis roof panels, not trusses, so some other way had to be found to lower the internal ceiling heights. Bates used a system he has tried before on renovation projects - Gyproc’s MF Suspended Ceilings. This enabled the builders to construct a false ceiling at a shallower angle than the roof.

This could be achieved with timber battening but the reasons for its success in commercial and industrial buildings apply equally to housebuilding and the angle adjustments are easy to accommodate with a suspended ceiling. Gyproc and its rivals, Knauf and Lafarge, offer broadly similar systems that are of increasing interest to housebuilders. Gyproc’s system comprises a lightweight steel framework. It sits in a perimeter channel which is first fixed into the walls at the desired height. The weight is borne by a number of readily adjustable hangers: it is this aspect that really shows a significant gain over using timber. Having created the frame with fixing channels at the appropriate centres, the plasterboard is then normally screwed into place for dry-lining although a skim finish can be applied if it is desired, as it was at the William Sutton Trust homes.

Besides the full suspended ceiling system, Gyproc has a cheaper product called Gyplyner which is of more direct interest to those still looking for ways to case the underside of a masonry intermediate floor. This allows you to fix into the concrete above and then hang a steel grid underneath designed to take plasterboard. The resultant void can be any size between 25mm and 130mm and can be used for running services including ducting, pipework, electrical cables and conduit.

“I’ll definitely use it again,” says Bates. “It’s so quick and simple that it’s almost tradeless. It’s a brilliant way of sorting out awkward roof angles in pitched roofs.