Ibstock Brick, the UK’s largest brickmaker, will be exhibiting a selection of its most innovative products at Ecobuild 2014, helping specifiers to meet both technical and aesthetic challenges while making the most of a renewed confidence in the construction industry through the use of real brick.

On stand N1120 Ibstock will be displaying the diversity, breadth and sustainability properties of its brick range, with its own expert design advisors on hand to handle queries and to showcase its leading service offer. Taking centre stage will be Ibstock’s relaunched and expanded Linear long thin brick range, Ibstock-Kevington’s innovative underslung brick-faced soffits solution and the ground-breaking BrickShield external wall insulation system.

Distinct design Ibstock’s Linear brick range has been created to provide specifiers with the flexibility to craft ever-more distinctive exteriors. It consists of a selection of longer, thinner bricks that give a dramatic elongated effect to accentuate the linearity of a façade. The range encompasses lengths from 240mm up to 490mm, in over 100 finishes, colours and textures, giving the opportunity to juxtapose the use of a traditional building material with a unique contemporary design style.

Underslung soffits Deep reveals and soffits are an increasingly popular design feature that add extra depth and dimension to masonry façades. Ibstock-Kevington’s unique expertise in the design and manufacture of masonry arches has allowed them to develop underslung brick-faced soffits - an effective solution to realise this popular design feature. This solution is ideal for unusually-shaped and long openings, or where there is restricted access or little or no bearing surfaces available. Furthermore, when combined with Ibstock-Kevington’s Fastwall real brick cladding panel system, it can create extra deep brick clad soffits.

Insulation through real brick cladding An innovative external wall insulation system – the only to have received British Board of Agrément approval – BrickShield can quickly and easily be installed to help insulate and thermally upgrade the external fabric of a dwelling. It is particularly suited to older buildings that have solid external walls, such as brick-clad Victorian and Edwardian properties, as it upgrades the property while allowing a real brick finish to be retained. Ibstock has also reported an increase in its use on new build properties, for a quick and simple way to ensure optimum energy efficiency whilst achieving the ever-popular aesthetic of real brick.

BrickShield now also offers a range of traditional features to complement brick cladding. This ‘Traditions’ range helps preserve the overall external heritage appearance of an area or building, and allows the home owner to retain older features such as stone quoins, heads and cills and brick arches.

Jo Lightfoot, senior market manager at Ibstock, said:

“With the construction industry seeing a renewed confidence from an uplift in activity, choosing the most popular cladding material – brick – for new projects opens up a vast number of options for the aesthetic and design properties of a building. What’s more, Ibstock foresaw this rise in construction activity and implemented measures to increase brickmaking capacity by over 125 million bricks per year, so is well-placed to meet the rise in demand across the market.

“Ecobuild provides a great opportunity for us to bring some of the most innovative products from our range to those that can benefit from them most – the specifiers. We want to highlight the fact that brick is the original sustainable material, and a fantastic solution, whatever the aim of a project’s design.”
