Housing all the functions of your business in one ideal, purpose-designed building is not a typical experience for many in South Africa’s manufacturing and distribution sector, but Chris Coetzee, CEO of Krisray (Pty) Ltd, has realized this ideal with the construction of his company headquarters in newly up-and-coming Philippi.

For R11 million, Coetzee has provided his well-established business with a just-completed architecturally immaculate 2 000m2 building that is, in addition, a direct product of top Cape Town architect Chris Bam’s overall guidelines for the brand-new industrial park where Coetzee chose his site. The park is close to the massive new Spar distribution centre that has added long term importance to this area.

Bam, who has become known for his far-sighted concepts in the entire range of architectural design, was given the task by the Johannesburg based Cavaleros Group, developers of Sheffield Business Park in Philippi, to create the architectural and design guidelines for the entire development. The more than 56ha park, north of Cape Town, is intended by its developers to stand as a prime example of a new design consciousness in collective industrial architecture.

To realise this objective they chose Bam for his previous cost-effective but advanced design concepts. Included in his brief was the creation of an impressive gateway to the development that inspires the tone and design culture for the entire project.

Some of this inspiration is to be found in the design of the Krisray Building in which 1 600m2 of space on two levels is currently used for all of Chris Coetzee’s business needs, including administration offices, showrooms, warehousing, factory area and distribution centre. Krisray provides fashion accessories, which include cosmetics, scarves, sunglasses, wallets, hats, fashion jewellery, lingerie, belts and home accessories, through most of South Africa’s main retail outlets. While 70% of his products are imported, he also makes a large number of high quality, competitively priced items locally. An additional 4 00m2 of floor space in the building remains for future expansion.

‘We need fast and efficient distribution to our customers and this building needed to facilitate that objective. So working on the premise that good design doesn’t have to be exorbitantly expensive, we asked Chris to design a building that is a reflection of the company and what it stands for

‘He has succeeded in creating comfortable and productive environment for the 120 people who work here. We are also quite pleased that our building, being the first in the park, has set a tone for future development - combining understated elegance with excellence in design and function.’

Chris Bam said the design of the building had first to meet with the diverse needs of the Krisray processes, including storage, and also a showroom that needed to be impressive. ‘We attended to all that and of course the more practical needs of economy, not only in the construction but also in the operation of the building in the Cape climate.’

Bam says there are various ways of approaching the ‘green’ aspects of a building, not all of them involving alternative power sources, but rather avoiding the need for excessive cooling or heating of the building. ‘One of our preoccupations is light, and this environment is spot-on to take advantage of natural sources, and ventilation is the other, in which orientation is key to its optimization. One makes the biggest gains by engaging the passive things, so we did solar modeling to get the natural shade just right and then used performance glass in the fenestration to reduce heat by reflection along with a decrease in external noise penetration as a valuable by-product.’