Brick remains one of the most trusted materials in UK construction and is often one of the more adaptable options for a facade. Michelmersh is a leading, premium clay brick manufacturer, and its off-site capabilities, bring traditional clay together with prefabrication technology to meet the twin pressures of programme speed and fire safety.

The core of the Michelmersh Group is brick itself. Its portfolio spanning brands, including Blockleys, Carlton, Floren, Freshfield Lane and Michelmersh, offer a wide palette of colours, textures and formats from soft handmades to straight-edged wirecuts. Combine that with more than 100 products suitable for a myriad of bonds, and brick can cover a range of tastes.

The Group provides a range of cladding options, starting with CMS40 – a lightweight facade system developed in partnership with Cladmate. CMS40 utilises mechanically fixed, non-combustible brick slips on a lightweight support frame to achieve the appearance of full brickwork without the weight and on-site labour that traditional demands. The system carries an A1 non-combustible rating, has been tested to BS 8414-2:2020 and CWCT standards, and is BBA certified.

What CMS40 offers over many competitors is its flexibility – the system can be specified with slips cut from Michelmersh’s own clay range, or slips can be fabricated by our prefabrication team from other manufacturers bricks, offering architects the choice of palette without locking them into a single option in order to achieve a prefabricated facade. That flexibility matters on projects where a brick has already been agreed with planners, or where a scheme needs to match existing brickwork.

Further to that, we offer our own Pro-Clad Façade systems, which provides a variety of brick faced cladding systems. Designed off site and for ease of use, Pro-Clad is versatile enough to cover a range of options and are BBA certified at a cost-effective price with low on-site effort.

An off-site model also changes the thinking around scheduling, because slips and support frames are manufactured and quality checked in the factory, on-site installation is faster and less weather dependent than traditional bricklaying, waste is reduced, and the components themselves can be recycled or reused.

Michelmersh’s Floren brand has developed the Reflections range, a collection built around double-faced clay bricks, each of which can be cut down the middle to produce two slips. Because both faces carry the same rustic, rounded edge finish, neither half is an off cut, and the process avoids the waste mass that comes from slipping a regular single faced brick. Perforations in the body of the brick create a deep keyed surface, suitable for mechanically-fixed systems.

Reflections is designed to hold its own aesthetically, the range comes in a variety of sizes and a set of rich hues intended to sit comfortably within different architectural vernaculars, with an aged textured faces achieved through a controlled production process which leaves every brick slightly different.

Together, these options highlight a direction of travel in the industry – brick will never be replaced and the route it takes from clay to façade is diversifying. For architects, that means a wider choice in the way a scheme’s aesthetics can reconcile with fire safety and cost without compromising on the material qualities which make brick worth specifying in the first place.

Discover more reasons to pick brick at mbhplc.co.uk.