The Playhouse Company

We’re getting into Royal Wedding celebrations here at The Playhouse Company. Kay (our director) is particularly excited having camped out opposite Buckingham Palace for the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana. Although Kay recently admitted to having not actually seen a thing she still claims to have loved every moment with the atmosphere being tremendous. Unfortunately, there’ll be no such trips to London this time and we’re instead getting camped up on the sofa with the telly … Although there’ll probably still be a flag waving!

The guys in the factory all seem fairly ambiguous towards the big day, however we suspect this is just a front and they’ll have whipped out the bunting by 11 am Friday morning.

At The Playhouse Company we are experts when it comes to building castles and whilst not too sure what the couple’s living arrangements will be post the big day, we’re only to happy to step into the breach. We are confident that we could provide a suitable abode fit for any fairytale prince or princes – complete with a tower, slide, ladder, climbing wall or whatever else could be possibly imagined! Here’s a few examples of some of our favourite castles that we’ve built in the past.

We hope that everyone has a fantastic time – whether you’re camping outside Buckingham Palace or just enjoying the day off work. If you would like more information on any of our products then please do get in touch … we can help every princess get her fairytale castle!

It’s certainly shaping up to be a great Easter with the fantastic weather hopefully here to stay! Alas, we must spare a thought for poor Tom (our production director), who hoping for some sun took a well earned break and headed with his family to Seville – only to be met with thunderstorms while we’re bask in the sunshine here!

Over the Easter holiday’s we’ve got Ben with us, he’s normally away at university but worked with The Playhouse Company for about three years prior to going and we relish any opportunity to have him back! Being an active kind of guy and very much into his climbing (the photo on the left is of Ben in action on the French alps), his favourite playhouse is this large castle play structure (see below).

There are hours of fun here as the castle has two symmetrical towers, each with weatherproof interiors and top roof areas joined by a 6ft long and 6ft high bridge which has monkey bars fitted underneath. At the back of each tower there are large cargo nets which are fitted to the ground and extend up to gaps in the top battlements. On the left hand tower there is ladder access and the right hand tower has a fireman’s pole. Also, on all of the ground floor walls there are climbing wall holds fitted so it is possible to get all the way around the castle without touching the ground. The castle has several look out points including a shutter window, jail window and two further windows on the ground floor of each tower. Both towers also have an octagonal topped main door at the front with a sliding peep hole and a small secret back door, perfect for a stealth exit or entry!

After weeks of eager anticipation our new website is finally live and there has been a great deal of excitement here at The Playhouse Company. The brand new site heralds the launch of our three new brilliant ranges – Go Play! Choice and You Design.

It was twenty years ago that we built our first playhouse (for our son), since then we have been working hard, listening to parents and children, committed to delivering brilliantly designed, high quality  playhouses. We believe that the three new ranges mark a great step forward for the company by offering an ever greater choice for parents and children.

Go play

We have taken six classic playhouse designs, including a Castle, Cottage on a platform, Cottage, Junior with platform and Junior. These are prebuilt which means that they are always in stock so are available quickly. The Go Play range are the same high quality as all our products but available at a lower cost because we’ve been able to create them in a larger number so can be more cost effective. The price includes delivery but not installation which can be added at addition cost.

Choice Collection

These are a selection of classic designs which can personalised and adapted by choosing your specification preferences and adding from a wide selection of options. Like the Go Play products, the playhouses have been partially prebuilt but are left for to you to customise. Similarly, the playhouses are of the same high quality as all our products and the price includes delivery with installation available at additional cost. Each of the thirteen designs is available in up to 38,000 different configurations.

Customers can choose;

• Door style – one piece, stable, different shaped cut outs, side of door hinging
• Window – opening, non opening
• Roof finish – felt, felt shingle, cedar shingle, slate effect colour
• Colour – over 108 different colours and finishes!

You Design Products

This is the much loved service we have been offering so far to date. Each playhouse is bespoke, built individually for you and delivered and installed by us. We cater for any design and shape, with the playhouse possibilities as infinite as your child’s imagination.

Over the past few years we have been installing an increasing number of classroom lofts as they become ever more popular. Essentially, they are internal playhouses / structures which are extremely space efficient, create additional useable floor space and provide more imaginative play areas within a classroom. Classroom lofts are very common in many other European countries but are a relatively new concept to the UK. At the moment we are currently building all our classroom lofts individually to the required specifications of a particular school location, however, we are in the process of developing a more generic modular system – which should reduce the cost and allow for quicker delivery.

Here are some pics of a nursery in Southampton where we installed a class room loft last year and recently revisited it. One year on and the nursery were thrilled with it, not only did the children find it great fun but also the staff felt it provided a ‘wow’ factor for when parents were looking around, initially deciding on nurseries.

Our projects to date can be viewed under the internal structures section on our website.

This week we have been working on a set of three lofts which are to be delivered to a nursery in Bristol. They are being built by Chris and his merry team – that’s Mark in action, doing some varnishing (see photo below). As you can see from the photos, we preparing some wooden tree cut outs, so we can now offer internal treehouses!

The Playhouse Company has also done a few domestic structures for high ceilinged bedrooms, please contact us for further details.

We recently created this magical playhouse which was on its very own little island, feeling like it was straight out of Swallows and Amazons! The octagonal playhouse has a steep roof, giving a really spacious feel. The door has a diamond shape cut into it and the four non opening rectangular windows make it extremely light inside. We also did the all the decking on the bridge and jetty – a truly beautiful project to be involved in.

Keeping with an aquatic theme, this is Dan with another of our recent projects, a boat he built for a school in Germany. Sadly I don’t think it would float too well so not much use for our Swallows and Amazons playhouse!

Here at The Playhouse Company, a unique aspect of all our products is that they come fully completed in the paint colour and finish of your choice. We always use sadolin paint predict which is brilliant quality and is exactly the same stuff as is used to paint real houses – here’s a link to the colours on our website. There are two different finishes, sadolin classic which is translucent where you can see the wood grain through it and sadolin superdec which is an opaque, solid paint. In total there is a choice of 108 different colours with our website featuring a large number of examples of different colours and combinations. Sadolin are happy to provide sample tins direct to customers, so you can try out colours in advance. For advice on which colours work well I recommend speaking to Kay as she has become something of an expert.

Alas, another week has past with our new website still not live, we are assured it will be launching very soon and are confident it will be worth the wait.

Our new website is still snagging unfortunately but hopefully will be live very soon – we’re better at creating and installing playhouses, see bottom paragraph! Well, the busy season is fast approaching and our order books are now full until mid-April. Luckily it’s not all hard work at The Playhouse Company and last week we were over in Amsterdam visiting our distributor for Holland and Germany. We were seeing Kidshousekeeping, a Dutch company who specialise in distributing a number of different playhouses including ours – www.theplayhousecompany.nl. It was great to catch up with all of them and also enjoy a nice couple of days in Amerstdam too! In total we have 13 foreign language sites across Europe and as far afield as Mexico and South Africa.

We recently installed this lovely little playhouse in a small city garden. Following a special request the front door has a star shaped cut out window and there’s even a door bell for the door.

Any shape can be cut out for a window and for two young Liverpool supporters they wanted the Liverpool Football Club logo. We relish the challenge of such requests, plus children love having their own input with a design – so let them be creative and put us to the test!

Recently Matt, one of our team leaders took on the responsibility of managing all our deliveries. Playhouse Company products all include delivery and installation in their price – this is not simply a matter of sending a package with a courier who may or may not turn up when expected or who at best provides a possible six home time slot. Here at The Playhouse Company things are a bit different and we pride ourselves on providing you with a hassle free day which hopefully you and your child will cherish.

• When you place your order we will allocate a delivery – this can either be a week commencing date or if you have a specific date in mind we can put in a firm date
• Two weeks prior to delivery we will be in contact to reconfirm the date and time
• We will give you an arrival time and the name of who will be installing your playhouse
• Your playhouse will be loaded on our own vehicles here in Herefordshire and transported directly to your garden
• We endeavour to do our utmost to be with you on time and should traffic be proving a problem we will phone to let you know
• We will install your playhouse and leave it all ready for your children to enjoy
• We ensure everything is left tidy and any rubbis is taken with us when we leave

… Beat that for great service?

Spring finally feels on the horizon here in beautiful Herefordshire and we’re looking forward to our own fresh start as our shiny new website is due to launch tomorrow (fingers and toes crossed!). With the glorious weather comes a host of playhouse enquires and we’ve been speaking to people all over the country – from London and Reading to Southampton, Torquay, Chatham and Liverpool. Given the approaching busy summer period the last few weeks have been spent building up stocks of windows and doors which should provide a quicker turn around for some of our new stock products. Another little project that David has been working on was the construction of this rather sweet, little play boat which will be sailing off to its new owner soon!

Here is another of our recent products which we really like (see pics below); it’s a playhouse with a raised play area and numerous extras to explore and have fun with. There’s an internal first floor with a veranda to the side and a chair swing beneath. Inside there is also a black board fitted and the main door has a letter box and a name plague fitted above – so there’s no excuse for getting your mail mixed up!

Also, this week is the Education Show at the NEC Birmingham and if you’re in anyway involved in teaching or developing children we’d highly recommend attending. It’s the largest show for all aspects of supplies to schools and is a truly excellent showcase for all that is available.

This was an incredibly exciting project which we finished last week – something for the truly adventurous.

The structure incorporates a playhouse, a castle, a decking area and multiple activities which provide exciting areas for children of all ages to play with and enjoy (not to mention adults!). The awesome specification includes – a playhouse, a castle over a river, staircase to the river bank, rope bridge, fireman’s pole, swing seat, horse swing and climbing wall – for a child the play potentials here are endless!

We’re just about getting back to normal here at Playhouse Company headquarters after a manic time last week with deliveries going out to London, Swansea, Liverpool and Birmingham. Half term is always extremely busy as it is the perfect opportunity for installing into schools and nurseries while the children are all off. As a result our factory in Kingsland was pretty quiet with people either out on deliveries or off taking holiday themselves.

Seeing as spring is nearly upon us (some days it feels closer than others) here are some tips for sprucing up your playhouse ready for the summer months.

• On nice days leave the door open to get air flowing through
• Clear out any build-up of leaves / debris from around the outside – particularly when hard up against a fence or hedge
• Wash down any internal plywood (especially the roof) with a watered down bleach solution, as the damp air often causes a slight mould growth, whilst it is perfectly safe this is most effective way of removing it
• Wash down outside decking areas that have become slippery, again this is due to a very thin layer of fungus growing on the surface, a pressure washer is great at removing it and then a watered down bleach solution will stop it for a season – this should be repeated each year
• If your playhouse could use a new coat of paint, we recommend sadolin products as these are the one we use and are readily available from crown decorator centres – to help further, here’s our colour index. If you need any help locating colours or paints, do give us a shout.

On a final note, we are very excited to now be in the final stages of tweaking our new website … Will keep you posted!

We now have a dedicated building on our main site specially designed for painting and spraying – it’s been very busy since it opened a couple of weeks ago! Through a complex system of filters and fans it provides a clean air environment and guarantees that no overspray goes out into the environment. The spray booth represents the end of the line for all our products, where they are hand painted or sprayed before being shipped off and beginning the journey to their new homes. Each component of a playhouse is painted separately prior to the final assembly, this means that some precise labelling is required to ensure they are painted correctly and can be easily assembled after. On average, around forty litres of stain and paint are used a week – this allows a huge choice of up to eighty colours in two different finishes.

As we have been posting on facebook, last week saw the completion of our extremely exciting project for Longleat Safari Park. Longleat house is probably most famous for its safari park but it also has a magnificent children’s play area within the adventure area. The Playhouse Company were given the task of creating a new castle structure and we have some pictures the finished product – see below the photo of Matt (part of the installation team) hard at work!

The launch of our new website is fast approaching, where we will be unveiling our exciting new range of products. For the last while we have been busy advertising and in the last month you may have caught us in English Garden, Period Living, Home and Gardens, Angels and Urchins, Country Living, Junior Magazine, RHS The Garden, BBC Gardens Illustrated, The Mail on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph.

For the last six weeks we’ve been busy building our fifteen brand new playhouse designs, ready for a photo shoot that took place last Saturday. One of the new products we’re particularly excited about is a playhouse which incorporates a shed – or a shed which incorporates a  playhouse depending on how you look at it! What makes this playhouse within a shed so clever is that we’ve devised a way to keep the interior spaces separate. As you can see from the left hand photo, from one angle it looks like a nice shed and from the other a lovely playhouse with a veranda, so all the family are happy. It provides children their own play area, Dad with a new shed to play in and Mum a tidy garden and some peace and quiet as everyone else is happy. Full details of this clever playhouse /shed will be on our new website which launches in a few weeks. If you can’t wait until then, do get in touch for more information.

Last Saturday’s photo shoot involved all our staff and was a tremendous team effort. In the morning we gave the new playhouse designs the ultimate in road testing when we had an open morning and invited people to bring in their children – and in some cases parents! It is a safe to say a fantastic time was had by all and our new products were incredibly popular across the ages. Lots of photos were taken of this special day and will be posted on the new website.

When putting up any playhouse or shed (let alone the fifteen we erected last Saturday) it is important to carefully consider the issue of planning permission. This has to be one of the most frequently asked questions and our best advice is to speak with your neighbours prior to installation. Local authrotirites are also always happy to offer advice to local residents. For more details visit our website