Cresta Mowana Units

Cresta Mowana is a set of modular units: a guest/accommodation-type box and an ablution unit, each built as a complete volume in the factory and delivered whole. The register lists the job as cold-formed steel (LSF) frame with LiteSpan wall panels and LiteSpan roof panels. The photographs bear that out — you can follow the same unit from a bare bolted floor cassette to a timber-clad object on a lowbed.

Technopol supplied both halves of the building. The frame is its own roll-formed galvanised cold-formed steel: a floor cassette of bolted channel joists inside a perimeter beam, corner posts, and a roof grid of the same sections, set on adjustable screw feet so the unit can be levelled on whatever it lands on. The envelope is LiteSpan — factory-laminated sandwich board, Chromadek steel skins bonded to an FRCel EPS core, double tongue-and-groove — dropped in between the posts as the wall and laid over the roof grid as the roof. The stack of boards standing beside the half-built units in the yard is the same board that is already standing as the wall behind it.

What the product had to do here is different from a normal building. It had to be structure, insulation and finish in one operation, because there is no second trade coming behind it: the inside face of the panel is the finished wall, the underside of the roof panel is the finished ceiling. And it had to survive being lifted, dragged onto a trailer and driven on a public road without cracking, sagging or opening its joints — a load case a masonry wall never sees. The frame carries that; the panel has to stay flat and stay closed while it happens.

It did. The finished units stand square, with the panel joints running true and the window openings cut and trimmed in the panel itself. In the ablution unit the ceiling is the panel — flat white, joint lines visible, and every light fitting surface-mounted, which is correct: the EPS-core panel is not to be used with recessed downlighter fittings. On the outside the units are finished in a vertical timber rainscreen over the panel, with the access hatch cut into the same battens, so the specifier is looking at a warm architectural box, not a site hut.

The album is a factory record, not a finished-site record: there is no photograph of these units standing on their final foundations. What it proves is the part Technopol is responsible for — that a cold-formed frame and a sandwich panel can be built into a habitable, transportable room and come off the truck intact.