Charles Sturt University

Charles Sturt University engaged Murrays Painting to repaint buildings across its Orange campus on Leeds Parade, the site that began life as Orange Agricultural College. The work ran across both exteriors and interiors, taking in facades, entry canopies, courtyards, foyers and internal circulation areas.

The campus is a mix of eras and that dictates the approach building by building. Building 1006 is a modern teaching block with composite panel cladding, a full-height glazed elevation and a run of yellow vertical fins that give the building its identity from the access road. Those fins are the first thing you see and the first thing to look tired if the colour drifts, so getting an even finish across every face of every fin was the whole job on that elevation. Elsewhere on campus the buildings are cream brick with tiled roofs, where the paintwork is concentrated on fascias, parapets, window frames and entry glazing.

Inside, the work covered foyer walls and ceilings, corridors and entry vestibules. These are high-traffic spaces that take a beating from bags, trolleys and weather carried in on wet days, so the finish has to be washable and the cut-ins have to be clean against tile, glazing and exposed timber.

One of the more particular parts of the job was the stair nosings. The main pedestrian stairs were picked out in a spectrum of colours running from green through yellow and orange to red, which reads as a design feature but does a safety job at the same time. A painted nosing gives a clear visual edge to every tread, which is what stops a stair becoming a trip hazard for anyone moving through in a hurry. Nosings also wear faster than almost any other painted surface on a campus, because every step lands on them.

Throughout, the constraint was that the university kept running. Students and staff needed to get to class while we worked, so areas were coned and taped off in sections, alternative routes were signed, and each stage was made safe and walkable before the crew left for the day. Tactile ground surface indicators had to be protected and reinstated cleanly rather than painted over. That is the difference between commercial and residential work more than anything else. The painting is the same, the sequencing around live use is not.

See more of our commercial painting work or read about what we do across Orange.