The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports on a visit to Pineapple Contract Furniture’s highly impressive Aylesford office and manufacturing base in Kent. Here he discovered that fundamental to the company’s growing success in mental healthcare has been developing a range with a design, features, and ‘style’, that reflect the views, experience, and preferences, of both healthcare providers and service-users – for whom the quality of the furniture they encounter daily can ‘make or break’ the comfort and ambience of the care environment.
The business that is Pineapple Contract Furniture today has its roots in Pine Productions, a company founded as a pine furniture manufacturer in 1975 in Purley, Surrey, by William Hathorn, the father of current managing director, Charles Hathorn. The company remains family-owned, but, having in 1995 changed its name to reflect a major broadening of its range, and expanded both its operations and customer base over the past three decades, is today one of the UK’s leading contract furniture manufacturers. Based at a modern, purpose designed facility in Aylesford near Maidstone, Pineapple supplies a wide range of furniture both to customers in acute and mental healthcare, and to schools, offices, care homes, hostels, sheltered housing facilities, and the custodial sector. Its products range from sofas and chairs with a lively contemporary design, to robust box beds designed for use in high secure mental healthcare settings.
Having gradually outgrown its former premises in Orpington, Kent – to which it moved in the mid-1990s, the company re-located again in late 2015 to the newly-built, three-storey glass-clad building in Aylesford. It now serves customers both throughout the UK, and across mainland Europe, America, Australia, and New Zealand. Alongside 11,000 square feet of attractive offices, the striking building houses a light and airy 5,000 ft2 top floor showroom, while immediately behind is a fully-equipped 100,000 ft2 factory and warehouse. Pineapple now sells into many markets, but, head of marketing, Jayne Shawcross, emphasised when I met her at the site, healthcare, and mental healthcare specifically, are key target sectors for the company; in recent years it has supplied facilities ranging from ‘step-down’ units to high secure hospitals. One of the aids to selection for visitors to the showroom – the company has a smaller showroom in Doncaster serving northern England and Scotland – is a colour-coding system that indicates the degree of severity of environment each item is designed for.
The company’s ‘Extra Challenging’ range, for example, comprises ‘the strongest, safest, and most innovative furniture’ the firm offers. As Pineapple puts it: ‘Reinforced chairs, antistashing sofas, and anti-ligature bedroom furniture, are the recommended choice for challenging environments like mental health units, learning disability services, and custodial buildings.’ Each product undergoes stringent British Standard tests to ensure sufficient robustness and strength. “However,” explained Jayne Shawcross, “one of our furniture’s stand- out features is that high performance and safety are coupled with a level of style and design flair you would expect in your lounge.”
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