New Indoor Play Attraction At Laidlaw Memorial Pool, Jedburgh Completed
David Thomas from Laidlaw Memorial Pool in Jedburgh got in touch to discuss the possibility of adding an indoor playground within a newly built swimming pool café. The venue was primarily a community pool, but the indoor playground added another reason to pay a visit or stop by the café.
This wasn’t a straightforward project due to an awkward space to work with. You can discover more about how we confronted this project’s spatial challenges and our services on the whole, right here. Or give the House of Play team a call to discuss our indoor playground design services.
Getting to Know the Business
Whenever we design and install play structures for clients, our first task is to understand more about their business and the business reasons they want the playground.
In this project, the venue was already a community swimming pool with a new café where swimmers could go after their session for a drink or snack. To try and attract more footfall to the swimming pool and to the café, David decided a children’s indoor playground was the answer.
And we agree! Adding an indoor play facility to sports businesses has proved a clever way to increase traffic and site profitability. Swimming pools, gymnastic clubs and other activity centres are choosing to add a play facility for these reasons.
Our service typically includes help finding financiers, dealing with planning permission, and business support. However, the client already had the venue running as a business, these services were not needed in this case.
Two Spatial Challenges
The main challenges of this project were in the space provided to create the play area. The dimensions consisted of many right angles (or close to it!), which always make the design process easier, but the floor space where the structure was to be installed included a troublesome pit.
Our designers had to come up with a solution to use the pit space and incorporate it into the overall structure of the playground. We knew that with some creativity and problem solving, the pit could be turned into a benefit.
We managed to achieve this by creating an entrance into the structure that brought the user onto the first floor and then allowed them to explore the pit below or go onto the next level. The team also had to iron away any blind spots to maintain the aesthetic of the structure.
You can get an idea of our design solution by looking at these images that reveals the lower pit:
No matter how unorthodox or challenging your available space is, our designers will come up with a safe and awesome solution.
A secondary spatial concern in this project was the pit itself. The structure used netting to enclose the space and keep all children safe. However, the netting was ineffective in the pitted area because we needed to push the boundary of the space close to the pit wall. To ensure the space remained safe to use when so close to a wall, we added more padding to these boundaries. You can spot the padding additions surrounding the pit in the image above.
Keeping the Playground on Brand
Choosing the colours and theme of the play equipment is a big decision. Sometimes it is made easy by using an overarching theme, such as wildlife, animals or cars. In this project, the client decided to use the red and blue colours from the swimming venue’s logo. This added consistency between the swimming pool, café and the playground.
The Client Experience
We’re happy that David got in touch to discuss his options and hope more swimming venues reach out to discuss increasing footfall with an indoor playground facility.
And we’re always here if David needs our professionals to provide additional services, such as equipment inspections, maintenance and professional deep cleans.