FURNITURE & INTERIORS Secure by Design
Catherine Hawcroft, product designer and dementia specialist at Knightsbridge Furniture, discusses how to create an environment that helps people living with dementia retain their confidence.
Imagine being unable to perform a simple task like tying your shoelaces. This should be easy, you’ve done it countless times before, but somehow you can’t make sense of the two pieces of fabric between your fingers. For many people living with dementia, everyday tasks like this grow increasingly difficult to perform and it becomes necessary to ask for help, something many have not had to do for a very long time.
This sudden dependency on others can negatively affect a person’s self-perception as well as how they are perceived by others. It is a confusing and frustrating condition, which can have a serious impact on independence, confidence and dignity.
Thankfully, a number of care home providers are taking vital steps towards ensuring life is a little easier for those living with dementia. One of the key developments in our understanding of the condition is the realisation that creating environments to support emotional and physical needs can positively affect residents’ wellbeing.
At Knightsbridge, we work in partnership with care home providers to ensure their living and communal areas are planned with the user in mind. Part of this involves helping to plan an environment holistically, with every element of the space, including chairs, carpets and wardrobes, considered as a whole.
This is an important approach to take. Many people living with dementia are affected by sensory impairment, making it difficult to differentiate between tonally comparable objects. For example, if a room’s door, walls and architrave are painted too similarly it can be almost impossible to distinguish the doorway. It’s therefore imperative to use a variety
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of appropriate tones and colours throughout a space to help highlight the location of certain objects.
It’s equally important to ensure all fabrics, carpets and worktop finishes used throughout a care home do not contain confusing patterns or create visual boundaries across floors. Designs like this can make users feel anxious and stressed; a flecked surface, for example, can appear dirty to someone living with dementia and result in them trying to clean it for prolonged periods of time.
Furniture should be chosen with just as much thought and consideration. We recommend providing chairs, beds, wardrobes and tables that are as robust and sturdily built as possible. Strong, dependable pieces of furniture will help residents feel safe and secure when using them. Ideally they should also be made with contrasting shades and textures to help people easily identify sitting and grabbing areas. The right items of furniture really can make a huge difference, helping to lower anxiety and improve confidence.
Something as simple as providing a defined edge on a table can also boost the confidence of people living with dementia. Clearer, more visible edges will make it less likely for things like knives, forks and glasses to be knocked off tables onto the floor. Such an occurrence would be a minor event to someone without dementia but it could prove distressing for a person whose confidence and self- esteem may already be low.
When designing our dementia furniture, we do everything we can to minimise any potential stress factors for users. For example, our Caspia furniture range, which has been designed for bedrooms and lounges but is also adaptable for kitchen areas, incorporates vision panels and
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open areas to allow better visual access for users. For people living with dementia, sometimes the fear of embarrassment can limit what they are willing to try. Making a cup of tea is a much less daunting task in a kitchen when you can immediately see where everything is.
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