Interior design
Market differentiation: creating an interiors brand
Park Grove Design director Lori Pinkerton-Rolet explains how to make a care home stand out of the crowd through carefully thought through interior design
Your most critical issue in care at the moment is unlikely to be creating an interiors brand but clarity of your offer can actually assist with staffing, retention, and overall residency levels. People want to live in a very specific place, a place they can call home, and this mindset is one of the first benefits of market differentiation. Do you have a favourite place in your own home where you feel most comfortable? It will be a specific location in a unique room. Creating these environments can be tricky because they are designed for many different people at the same time. Yet having opportunities for very personal ‘spots’ within even a large room provides a sense of ownership for the resident. In the example shown right, the inside
of the fixed shelving is in a strongly coloured laminate identifying this as the Violet Lounge. Staff can easily look through the fixed objects to see everyone in the lounge and yet the division creates a sense of privacy and delineates between more interactive and quieter spaces. If each ward were to have a different palette with a similar layout, you will have begun creating an interior brand that is uniquely identifiable with personal spaces for residents, staff and visitors. In addition to creating resident
‘ownership’ of spaces, interior branding can save time for operators and potential residents. Put simply, one aesthetic will not appeal to everyone. The more definitive your aesthetic, the more people who will feel at home there will be drawn to it. Likewise, images of your interior
branding should convey in which part of the market you sit: high, medium, or budget. If
February 2022
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com
Violet Lounge
someone has lived their life in luxury, it is reasonable for their expectations in relation to their next home to be similar. A person who has never lived in such an environment may either find this aspirational or somewhere they might never feel truly at home. The point is this: strong interior branding differentiates where you sit in the marketplace.
Regardless of what interior branding theme you develop, it is essential that all aspects tie directly back to operational ease. You are primarily offering care, not artwork, dogs or plants.
A home from home You can always tell when a home is going to look like just another care home. The website will have a significant number of pictures of smiling older people and staff and absolutely nothing showing the environment in which people live. Why? Because no one actually wants
to live in a care home or any place that looks like one. Overleaf is an example of an integrated retirement community corridor, but for care home you would add a contrasting handrail, fix any furniture to the wall - dependant on your fire officer and corridor width - and add scrubbable paint. It does not take much. In this example, the interior brand is fresh, contemporary, clean and bold. If you were looking on this website, you would know something about the atmosphere. Care must of course be exceptional –
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©Park Grove Design
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