Feature Fins, Hilton Garden Inn, Heathrow, London

Project Overview:

Hilton Garden Inn London, adjacent to Terminal 2, Heathrow Airport has undergone a £4.2million pound renovation with all rooms refurbished, including meeting rooms and three new conference rooms added. This 14-storey hotel is the tallest building within the Heathrow curtilage. The exterior has also been redesigned with long vertical aluminium fins rising from the ground to the very top of the building. These are made up in sections, each section coated satin white. It was imperative that every fin was consistent in colour to give a homogenous appearance within each fin and between fins along the full length of the installation.

Consistency of White:

Powder coatings have very good colour consistency from batch to batch, better than that of mixed wet paint. But to ensure that the fins matched from section to section, and between different fins we employed an additional checking procedure. Even the slightest difference in shade can be detected by the naked eye, especially with white. Delta-E is the notation used to represent the difference between two colours. A dE of around 1.2 is the smallest colour difference the human eye can see, although this can differ for different colours. We measured every one of around 400 white-coated 2.5m sections against the next to ensure that a dE of <1.2 was maintained. We take colour matching very seriously and have the process controls in place to ensure that consistency is maintained.

The hotel is located on the Eastern Perimeter Road and the external façade will be subject to some traffic-induced air pollution. Polyester powder finishes are simple to maintain, requiring cleaning with a mild detergent and rinsing with clean water on a regular basis to keep them looking gleaming white.