We were commissioned by Tim Philbin of Design Business Interiors to help with a project for Manchester Academy who needed to accommodate more people and refresh their working environment.

Manchester Academy is a vibrant, dynamic and forward-thinking learning community, which embraces diversity and is committed to ensuring the success of its students.

Having worked extensively with Tim, he knew we would be able to come up with a solution that met his challenging specification to design and fit more StorageWall that could incorporate 150 gratnal trays into just 5 metres of storage area.

The Academy already had the storage trays. The James Tobias team were tasked with including the brackets and mid-wall dividers that would allow us to incorporate as many trays in each unit as possible.

And we had to do that while ensuring everything fitted together properly and looked smart.

An additional factor to consider was the additional storage space above the trays which was filled by plain shelves.

Our solution was to incorporate mid-walls within the 1000mm wide units. We did this by drilling the mid-walls and the main sidewalls with a pegboard set of drillings, so taking into account the size of the gratnals and allowing us to identify how high to set the mid- shelf. The mid-shelf and base were drilled for the mid-wall at the correct width to allow the trays to run smoothly.

We focused on resolving the problem of how to make the trays avoid the door hinges. Full height doors meant that we then only had to get over any issue created by the bottom hinge as the others were all higher than the mid-shelf above the trays.

We resolved this issue by double punching the aluminium on the sidewall, allowing adjustment of the bottom hinge 50mm lower that its normal position.