New opening


Broomfield Village: a ‘home from home’ as a matter of Principle


Principle Care Homes recently opened Broomfield Village Care Home – the provider’s first. The Care Home Environment editor Matt Seex met with Principle Care Homes’ managing director Ashish Goyal and customer relationship manager Laura Mansfield to discuss and explore this impressive new home


Broomfield Village Care Home in Chelmsford, Essex is the first to be opened by Principle Care Homes. The operator’s managing director is Ashish Goyal, nephew of Hallmark Homes’ Avnish Goyal, and – along with his sister, Principle co-founder and finance director, Nisha Goyal – one of several Goyal family members making a name for themselves in the care sector. The site of Neolithic and Bronze Age settlements, and later occupied by the Romans, Chelmsford has been the county town of Essex since the 13th century. At the end of the 19th century, Guglielmo Marconi established his Wireless Telegraph Company in Chelmsford, and the city became known – somewhat contentiously – as the ‘birthplace of radio’, with Marconi making Britain’s first official publicised sound broadcast in 1920.


For its first care home, Principle Care


Homes decided to purchase and regenerate an existing four-storey care home located directly behind Broomfield Hospital. Originally known as Essex County Hospital, the hospital was built in the late 1930s (although it has been extensively rebuilt and remodelled over the years). The Care Home Environment visited the 137-bed Broomfield Village in mid-February, when the home had been open for only five weeks, to chat with Ashish Goyal about the project and Principle’s future plans, and to meet with customer relationship manager Laura Mansfield for a tour of the home.


A complete regeneration Principle purchased the existing care home in 2021, with works to completely regenerate the building and grounds finally getting underway in 2023. Originally scheduled for completion in September 2024, minor delays saw the home finished in December. With six residents already in situ, Principle is in no rush to reach capacity


April 2025 www.thecarehomeenvironment.com


on its first project, with the process expected to take around three years. “We are firmly focused on getting this right,” Ashish explains. “The important thing is to get the care right, and to make sure that we are growing at the right pace. So there isn’t a rush to get to [137 occupied beds]. It’s about taking that time to make sure that we embed culture, processes, and systems, and to make sure that we’ve got a robust hierarchical structure within the home. Because that clinical governance and oversight within the home is going to be really important.” In other words, Broomfield Village


will allow Principle to firmly establish the procedures and ethos that the operator will then take forward to its future projects, the next of which will be a new home in Fleet, Hampshire, which is due to open in early


Principle decided to purchase and regenerate an existing home


2026. While this second home will be a new build, Broomfield Village saw Principle instead taking an existing care home and radically transforming it.


“We don’t like to call it a refurb, because


it was far more than that,” says Ashish. “It was a regeneration of the existing home. The contract budget in the end was about £14m, with total project costs of about £20m, so it wasn’t a lick of paint and a bit of new furniture. It was beyond that.” It was clear to Ashish and the Principle


team exactly what needed to be done to transform the existing building into a care home fit for the 21st


century. “When we came to look around, you


could see the sadness in the building,” says Ashish. “Our job was to redesign, to look at all of the things that we wanted to see within a care home – the open plan café, the hydrotherapy pool, the exercise studio, the physiotherapy suite … and then a variety of bedroom sizes. We’ve got classic bedrooms, premium bedrooms, and suites. So we worked on that, and four years later here we are.”


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