New Indoor soft play attraction ready for local residents
Dobbies is a renowned garden centre chain spread across the length and breadth of the UK. They cater to all your gardening needs and usually have an on-site café so you can make a day of your gardening shopping.
House of Play has designed and installed play spaces at a number of their branches, making us the lead soft play supplier of their business. The latest branch where we have installed a soft playground is their Woodcote Green centre based in Wallington.
You can discover more about our projects with Dobbies below, and specifically more about our latest installation at their Woodcote Green branch.
Understanding the Purpose
Our design team always make it their first priority to understand the client’s business and why they need our services and play equipment. In the case of Dobbies, their branches require an indoor soft play space to increase footfall at their on-site café, or encourage families to stay longer and maybe buy an extra drink or snack. The play space could even make families choose Dobbies over other garden centres in the area.
Therefore, one of the priorities of this project was to create a soft play space that maximises capacity with a WOW factor, while being mindful of project cost.
The soft play centre we created at Dobbies Woodcote Green was 100% free for café customers to use, meaning the project must be a good return of investment for the garden centre as a whole. Moreover, the design we create must match the Dobbies branding at all of their existing branches.
Indoor Soft Play Design Process
The process of designing a soft playground for Dobbies was to first analyse the company branding and discuss how we could transfer their industry and branding into a soft play design. The natural thing to do was to use similar colours from their brand within the soft play, and most importantly, play on the theme of gardens, plants and outdoor spaces.
We provided the Dobbies management team with our design ideas tailored to their allocated indoor space. We supplied this in a 3D virtual design that the client could use to imagine how the space would look. They received plenty of opportunities to suggest changes or make their preferences known. Only once they were happy with our designs would we start manufacturing the bespoke soft play equipment.
We made sure the designs accommodated young children up to eight years old. We separated one space within the design just for babies. In doing so, we made the space appealing to more families – and kept in mind the overall aim of increasing footfall and time spent visiting the centre.
You can see how we clearly divided the space to appeal to more families here:
The Approved Soft Play Design
The overall design of the indoor soft playground used colours recognisable from the Dobbies brand, which enabled us to play on the garden theme easily.
The soft play products were made bespoke and incorporated objects and animals you would typically find in a garden. For example, we included soft play plant pots, a snail soft play rocker, soft play watering cans – and much more.
It’s not just the soft play equipment that contributed to the garden theme, but how it all comes together with other aspects of the design, including the parameters of the soft play space and the safety items.
Specifically, we used green safety mats with flowers on them to create a grassy and flowery feeling to most of the space. We even chose to enclose the space with a garden fence and tree designs, rather than only using mesh netting.
These are some highlights, but every aspect of the soft play design was made with the gardening theme in mind, merging the whole space with the Dobbies brand. House of Play can cater to any brand or theme because we manufacture bespoke play equipment here in Britain.
When Life Gives You Lemons…
There is no soft play project without a few problems to overcome. When creating the indoor soft playground for Dobbies Woodcote Green, the predominant issue was the protruding roof beams.
The beams on the roof inhibited a straightforward dual-level structure. These roof beams meant our designers had to create a design that avoided and accommodated the beams to not disturb the structural integrity of the space.
These sorts of issues are overcome through our brilliant team of thinkers and doers, as well as leading CAD design technologies.
Do You Want Soft Play Design Services?
If you want House of Play to design, manufacture and install bespoke soft play equipment for your venue, don’t hesitate to contact our friendly team.
We work with large chains like Dobbies and smaller independent businesses. Whatever your soft play vision – large or small – we are here to help!
Contact us now and let’s have a chat about your soft play project!