New opening
Maplewood Court: luxury care in the Garden of England
Oakland Care has recently opened Maplewood Court in Maidstone, Kent. Matt Seex visited this new, purpose- built 72-bed luxury home to find out more about its construction and the services and facilities it offers
Oakland Care’s new Maplewood Court Care Home is situated in a quiet residential area close to the centre of Maidstone – Kent’s largest town, and home to over 100,000 people. I visited the £7.3m build in July to take a look around and to chat with Richard Dooley, development director at Oakland Care, and Phil Holding, managing director of Horizon Construction, which was responsible for the construction of the new home. Oakland Care operates care homes across Essex, Kent, East Sussex, and Oxfordshire. Maplewood Court is the provider’s eighth operational home, with a further two currently under construction. Oakland obtained planning permission in January 2020, demolishing the single- storey care home that stood on the site previously. Having only just opened to a handful of residents, Maplewood Court is an impressive two-storey building that incorporates distinctive grey Kent stone into its construction. Set in newly- landscaped gardens, the home is designed to accommodate up to 72 residents, with a phased increase in numbers likely to take between a year and eighteen months. As for fees, they are around £1,400 per week, rising a little for dementia - or ‘memory’ - care. In terms of staffing, Maplewood Court will see between 80 and 90 people employed in a mix of full and part time roles once the home is operating at capacity. For Oakland, the location of Maplewood
Court is key. As Oakland’s Richard Dooley puts it: “We’re a growing business and we like to develop homes in small clusters, which offers us operational efficiencies. We’ve just finished a project in Swanley and we have a further home under construction in Hildenborough which will provide a small cluster of homes in the Kent area. We also have a group of homes around the north section of the M25 in Chigwell, Enfield, and Loughton, which provides us another small
September 2022
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com
Phil Holding and Richard Dooley outside Maplewood Court
cluster. Our growth plans are to keep adding new homes to the portfolio each year and we are continually looking for suitable sites.” He adds: “Maidstone is a good location for a new home, as there’s an undersupply of modern standard care home bedrooms in the wider area.”
It helps that Maidstone is a large town
and well-served by public transport. “Recruiting a new team is really crucial to the success of a new development, and Maidstone offers sufficient depth of population to enable this to happen,” says Richard. “Our homes are generally in urban areas to allow us the best chance to recruit staff locally. A large proportion of the new
Building a care home comes with its own particular challenges, and Horizon sought subcontractors with specific expertise
team will use public transport to get to and from the home, so access to transport facilities is vital when assessing new development locations.”
Construction challenges Having been designed by ADG Architects, with WA Consulting Engineers serving as structural engineers and Aedifice Partnership as project managers, Maplewood Court was delivered by Horizon Construction. While the project came in on budget, recent events and circumstances meant a short delay in completion. According to Phil Holding, Horizon Construction’s managing director: “After COVID settled a little, the material price rises hit this industry quite hard, and not just the price, the availability – probably more the availability than price, to be honest with you … availability was the big one, mainly timber and steel, and the timber crisis hit us just about when we were doing the roof, which is all built of timber and steel. That was our main problem and
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