New opening
Braintree Mews: first-class care on the Horizon in Essex
Horizon Construction has recently finished building Braintree Mews, a 75-bed care Avery Healthcare care home located in the Essex town of Braintree. The Care Home Environment editor Matt Seex visited the impressive new home to discuss the build
Braintree Mews is a new, 75-bedroom, £8.4m care home that has been built by Horizon Construction for Avery Healthcare, one of the largest care home providers in the UK, with around 100 homes dotted around England, primarily in the South East and the Midlands. Braintree itself is an unassuming town in Essex, in the East of England, with origins going back some 4,000 years. It boasts excellent rail links to London, as well as bus services to neighbouring towns and cities including Chelmsford and Colchester. Nestled amongst some new build homes, with a new college site nearby and a GP surgery already established, Braintree Mews feels very much a part of a wider community. I visited Braintree Mews in early September, to meet with Horizon’s managing director Phil Holding, site manager James Wilby, and business development & marketing manager Courtenay Austin, to chat about the project and to take a tour of the home, which on the day of my visit was some two weeks from completion, and the scene of much last- minute activity as Phil and his team readied themselves for Avery to sign the project off.
Local expertise Readers may recall Phil Holding from my article in the September 2022 issue of The Care Home Environment on Maidstone’s Maplewood Court care home – a £7.3m build that was delivered by Horizon for Oakland Care. Indeed, Phil credits Horizon’s exposure in The Care Home Environment as having played an important part in landing the Braintree Mews job.
“This job primarily came about due to
our work with you last time,” he reveals. According to Phil, although Horizon were already on Avery’s radar, once they read the article, the realisation came that Horizon
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would be a good fit for the Braintree project. Accordingly, Horizon was invited to tender. Having identified the eastern region as
having opportunities for new growth, Avery are already in discussion with Horizon about further projects in East Anglia. While Braintree Mews is the provider’s first care home in Essex, Avery already enjoys a presence in Braintree, as it operates The Hawthorns Retirement Community in Braintree. When I subsequently reached out
Horizon’s successful collaboration with Avery is already leading to new opportunities for the company
to Adrian Doyle, director of developments at Avery Healthcare, he told me that the area was “ … under-provided for quality care beds,” and that “Braintree Mews will also be able to support residents from The Hawthorns whose needs change and provide them with a care option they will have familiarity with.”
Horizon Construction is based in Colchester, a larger Essex town located a mere 15 miles east of Braintree, and this was another instrumental factor in Avery choosing Horizon for the job. “Working with a contractor that they didn’t know – they wanted to have confidence in doing that,” explains Phil, “and half of that confidence is built by the fact that we’re local. We’re 20 minutes down the road, so for us it’s a superb project.”
Phil tells me that Horizon’s successful
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com November 2023
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