Pacific, Palm Beach

Pacific is a nine-storey building right on the beach at Palm Beach, finished in raw precast tilt panels, a look that won it a swag of design awards. Up close, the slab ends told a different story: minor concrete spalls where there wasn't enough cover over the reinforcement. We scanned every slab end across the façade and mapped a total of 103 repairs.

Because of where it sits and how it looks, we worked with the original builder to keep swarf to an absolute minimum, wet core-drilling the problem uprights out instead of cutting them. We treated the exposed steel with a Master Builders Solutions system, patched the core holes, coated each repair with a non-sealing activated corrosion inhibitor, then ran a fairing coat across the majority of the slab ends.

Then came the painting, and it turned into one of the hardest jobs we've done. A latent condition in the concrete substrate meant the first coats simply wouldn't adhere. We stripped it all back with grinders and M-class vacuums and went deep: chasing the original builder, the precast company and several of Australia's leading paint manufacturers, running adhesion tests right across the building with different sealers and membranes.

The combination that finally passed every test was the Haymes system: Rendertex Masonry Sealer under Rendertex RenderShield. The committee chose Winter Fog. I still drive past it and think how good it looks, how close it still reads to raw concrete, which was the whole point.