Explore the rise of Lithuanian facade specialist, KG Constructions
With 17 years of experience delivering high-performance curtain wall solutions across Northern Europe, the name KG Constructions (KGC) has become synonymous with quality and reliability. Backed by a hardworking and passionate team, KGC excels in fulfilling unique architectural visions for clients and designers across a wide range of projects.
Leveraging its extensive expertise in the technical design of complex building facades, the Lithuanian organisation has established itself as a key industry player in Northern Europe. Constantly growing, KGC has expanded geographically by opening offices in the UK and Switzerland and signed its first contract for a project in London in mid-2022.
“Founded in 2007 in Lithuania, KGC started from humble beginnings and quickly evolved into a substantial and successful enterprise supporting two production facilities. Last year, the group turnover rose to 80 million euros, and we are on track to continue our consistent and steady growth going forward,” begins Richard Till, COO.
Richard describes the beginnings of KGC’s operations in the UK. “With a small group of long-term former colleagues, we joined KGC in the late summer of 2021, some of us having worked in the UK facade industry for more than 30 years, often working on high-profile projects. From day one, we engaged our contacts in the market and supported them with technical and financial advice. In parallel, we began to prepare our processes and systems ready for our forthcoming project operations, including sourcing insurance such as professional indemnity and obtaining accreditations like Achilles and ISO 9001, 14001, and 45001. Upon our first meeting with our Lithuania colleagues, we were immediately aligned in our approach to doing business and our key strategies for entering the UK market. We knew that doing so would be a challenging endeavour, as the technical and contractual requirements here in the UK are complex and demanding. Without an experienced team to manage each stage of the project delivery process, the risks can be significant, and so we started building a team of people who knew the UK façade market in both the UK and Switzerland.”
Cutting-edge technology
Before its entry into the UK market, KGC was already a sizeable group of companies operating throughout the Baltic States and Scandinavia. Richard provides more insight into the parent and subsidiary making up the KGC family. “Beneath the parent lies our main operational company, KG Constructions, and our respective local market entities in each of the countries in which we currently operate. KG Constructions is our headquarters and the centre of our operations, including general management, our two production facilities, and all functions departments like design and procurement. Additionally, we have our in-house logistics company, enabling us to deliver our products to the job sites across Europe ourselves. The country subsidiaries are the legal entities in the respective markets and the local teams fulfil market-specific functions, such as sales, project and site management, health and safety, and quality. Currently, we have a directly employed team of 14 people in the UK and we plan to steadily grow this team further as the volume of business increases. 
“For our UK projects, the curtain wall design process is led by our team of specialist designers and engineers based in Basel, Switzerland. This team has worked on many high-profile façade projects in the UK over the last 25-to-30 years; they have extensive knowledge and experience in the commercial office and residential sectors of the UK market. The Basel team works closely, not only with our teams in Vilnius and London, but also with our clients and their professional teams, and we are already collaborating with some of the most renowned European architects on projects for highly prominent clients.”
Next, Richard sheds light on the facilities and equipment enabling KGC to provide its range of standard and bespoke façade systems. “We have 600 employees, and we currently operate seven production lines, giving us a capacity of over 100,000 square metres of unitised facades per year. We have one of the most technically advanced and innovative curtain wall production facilities in Europe; visiting clients have repeatedly noted that our facilities, equipped with cutting-edge technology, robots, and automated machinery, are more akin to modern-day automotive production than a curtain walling factory. However, the key to our competitiveness, performance, and product quality is the processes and systems we use to monitor and control our operations. We report on over 300 KPIs daily and adopt management techniques to ensure any issues are identified and resolved quickly. The culture of lean manufacturing is also very strong within KGC, we are always trying to optimise our work and our processes, to ensure we become ever more efficient.
“Our core product portfolio includes unitised, bespoke, and standard system, aluminium and glass facades, plus all the associated finish, material, and component options, such as terracotta, GRC, stone, doors, and windows. We also regularly offer stick facades, mostly for ground floor and entrance locations on our unitised projects.
“In recent years, climate change has demanded a new focus within the construction industry to reduce embodied carbon and to further enhance thermal performance,” Richard proposes. “At KGC, our design and engineering expertise allows us to highly optimise our technical solutions, to bring substantial improvements even with aluminium framed curtain walls. Going forward, we need further innovation, and over the past year, we have been developing and testing a new KGC unitised timber curtain wall solution, which takes both embodied carbon and thermal performance to the next level.”
Notable project portfolio
The Baltic States and Scandinavia will continue to remain key markets for KGC, but the decision to also target the UK allows the business to expand its horizons, work with new clients, and facilitates its ambition to continue the group’s steady and stable growth.
“We have already come a long way in the UK,” he states. “We initially chose to keep our costs down by operating from a basement office near Tower Bridge in London. Since then, we’ve steadily secured projects and increased our revenue, allowing us to move to a new larger office on London’s Southbank, which in turn has enabled us to grow the highly competent and strong team that we have today.”
Delving deeper into the specifics of KGC’s first project in the UK, Richard reveals that it took the company just under a year to secure. “Situated in Hammersmith, West London, our first project involves the construction of a 700-bed PBSA (Purpose Built Student Accommodation) for Dominus Real Estate,” he explains. “For context, the UK has experienced tremendous demand in new student accommodation buildings due to the burgeoning student population in all the major cities, which currently stands at about 2.8 million. We collaborated with HG Construction, the main contractor, as well as architects from world renowned Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners (RSHP). Since starting construction in September 2023, KGC has already completed all the main unitised facades and is now well progressed with the final works to the core and ground floor. For a first project, we are delighted how it has gone; it’s been very successful for
all involved, and we are looking forward to seeing the finished project bring in its first intake of students.”
KGC UK secured its second project in the summer of 2023, a 30-storey residential tower in Liverpool. “The project we are working on, called AO6, encompasses over 10,000 square metres of bespoke unitised curtain wall,” he details. “The project is part of the ongoing Liverpool Waters masterplan, a 30-year strategy to transform the city’s northern docks. We started the installation in early May, and we are already progressing well. Plus, we are pleased to say we have two more exciting new projects in the pipeline.”
With its success securing major projects in London and Liverpool, KGC is well-positioned to continue expanding within the UK facade industry.