SF luxury highrise gets complete facelift
Royal Towers
One of San Francisco’s premiere luxury residences, Royal Towers, was in need of repairs after over fifty years of built-up coatings, spot repairs, and temporary fixes. Wiss Janney Elstner designed the complete restoration, which included completely stripping down the existing coating, repairing the concrete substrate, replacing all caulking, recoating the eyebrows with traffic coating, and installing silicone elastoemric coating on the whole exterior. A repair like this will protect the building for decades.
Older buildings that have been through various stages of temporary waterproofing repairs greatly benefit from a complete restoration when budgets allow. It takes a specialty contractor to be able to perform all necessary repairs, especially on a highrise with very difficult access, demanding clients, and meticulous inspectors. Even at twenty stories in the air, it is a game of inches; you need to make sure there are zero breaches in the waterproofing system applied.
What We Did
Removed all coatings from the concrete exterior.
Repaired over 500 concrete spalls, including forming and pouring balcony ledges
Caulked all window perimeters
Applied traffic coating to all picture window eyebrow ledges
Applied Dow All Gaurd silicone elastomeric coating to the entire surface - over 80,000 sf
Project Details
The building had very challenging access from the swing stage, part of which was the regular high windows on top of Nob Hill in San Francisco. In these conditions, over 50 years of high-build elastomeric coating were completely stripped off, down to bare concrete, by an abatement subcontractor. With the underlying concrete substrate exposed, work began to repair the hundreds of concrete spalls that were hidden under the coating. Many spalls and weak areas in the concrete shell were due to the variety of materials that made it into the concrete pour during the original construction. Nails, wires, 2x4 wood pieces, cans, etc. All of these were weak points and had to be removed in order to repair the concrete spalls. All bugholes in the 80,000 sf wall were filled in as well, in order to provide a smooth, pinhole-free surface for the coating to follow. It is important with elastomeric coatings that there are no pinholes for water to harbor and create entry points over time.
With the substrate made pristine and structurally stable, we installed new sealant at all expansion joints, window perimeters, penetrations, and plane changes. Over 50,000 linear feet in all. The walls were then fully primed, and then two coats of Dow AllGuard silicone elastomeric coating were applied. The last pieces of the complete protective coating system were the window eyebrow ledges. These low-slope flat surfaces cannot simply be coated with the elastomeric coating. Water collecting and remaining on that flat surface will eventually erode the coating. For that application, we used Neogard urethane traffic coating, which is an extremely durable coating designed to withstand standing water and is extremely UV-resistant.
Over a year and a half in the making, Royal Towers has a top-of-the line waterproofing system expertly installed that will last for decades to come.
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