Today’s EADT Aldeburgh supplement

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Should bathroom cabinets be locked?

FOUR out of ten women have snooped in a friend’s bathroom cabinet – to uncover intimate secrets about their beauty regime, health or love-life, new research reveals. A study by Jeyes brand Bloo found that the temptation of uncovering secrets leads millions of women to indulge in a quick rummage with the bathroom the room in the house where a cheeky snoop behind the scenes is irresistible.

Remarkably, one in twenty has been cheeky enough to take something from someone else’s bathroom cabinet for their own use. It also emerged that a third of women have snooped in a potential new boyfriend’s cabinet to search for female-related products. The study of 2,000 women, commissioned by leading bathroom care brand, Bloo, found that more than two thirds of women describe themselves as a touch nosy.

While 75 per cent are convinced you can tell a lot about a person by the appearance of their bathroom. It makes sense then that 84 per cent of women say they always clean the bathroom before welcoming visitors, believing that they will be judged more by this space than any other in their homes. Psychologist Jo Hemmings, who worked alongside Bloo on the research, commented: “The bathroom is unique in our homes as it is quite personal, yet also relatively public.

“While we probably don’t spend as much time in there as some of our other rooms, it nevertheless holds a lot of our ‘secrets’ and reveals a little more about our personalities. “We feel that people will judge our general hygiene standards by the cleanliness of our bathrooms and of course it’s also the one room where you can lock yourself away in someone else’s home, providing the perfect opportunity to have a little peek into aspects of their lifestyle.”

The study also found sussing out a potential partner’s beauty or skin regime and snooping in order to find out how vain someone is were other common reasons to give in to temptation. It comes as little surprise then that over half of women believe that friends have returned the favour and had a cheeky snoop around their bathroom. And that 85 per cent worry that they will be judged on its appearance.

Perhaps that’s why a fifth of women leave cleaning products clearly visible so that their commitment to bathroom cleanliness and aesthetics is obvious to guests. Indeed, 29 per cent of women say they are most concerned with the bathroom being welcoming and stylish.

So, if you want a welcoming and stylish bathroom, perhaps with locks on the cabinets, pop in and see us we’re here to help.

Pandora’s Box

In the fun and glamour of glitzy kitchens and celebrity chef cooking demonstrations it’s easy to overlook the fundamental craftsmanship that underlines everything that we do. As Marco Pierre White is a cook, Picasso a painter and J K Rowling a writer – we at Anglia Factors are cabinet makers. We manufacture bespoke interiors from (mainly) wood; book cases, cupboards, tables, kitchen and bathroom cabinets and home cinema enclosures. All in our workshop in Martlesham.

An example of just such a cabinet is often overlooked in our showroom, located between the old and the new areas is pandora’s box; a beautiful piece a wood that, when opened reveals what a cupboard can be!

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Home IMAX for just £1.8m

Image credit: TK Theatres

We’re indebted to the Gadget Website for this news: – Whenever high net worth individuals gather, they like to row over who has the best home cinema. Well now there’s a special attack that allows instant victory in such an argument: having an IMAX in your house.

It is pretty hard to trump having a full-on IMAX cinema in your subterranean space. But it can be done: Ideaworks and IMAX have teamed up to offer IMAX Private Theatre to UK dwellers for £1.8 million. The full list of what you get is below, but here’s the summary:

You get dual, “commercial-grade” 4K projectors, promising 2D and 3D, native and upscaled images of a quality (and size, if you’ve got the space) that’s very hard to beat.

Image credit: TK Theatres

There’s also access to 200 IMAX films of recent vintage with instant access, via the web, to new ones on the day they hit cinemas, via the same “Day and Date” download system used in modern cinemas.

You also get the design and installation of a full home theatre with, interestingly, as many seats as you can fit – your 1.8 million is flexible here.

You can also use the system for gaming and standard TV – something like Game of Thrones or Netflix’s 4K streams should look great, though we’re not sure the One Show would look quite as peachy. Quirkier features include the ability to spilt the screen into four separate streams – multiple football matches during the World Cup, for instance – with the option to have both 3D and 2D frames up there simultaneously. Quite why you’d want to do that, we don’t know, but it is technically very impressive.

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Dining room demise

I don’t think that it will surprise most of us the sales of dining room furniture are in decline. Smaller households, cafeteria style dining in the home and the rise of the television as the true focal point at dinner time have rendered dining room furniture almost obsolete in many houses across Britain. Indeed, according to research from Mintel, over the last five years alone sales of dining room furniture have declined by 8% to just £119 million this year. This decline defies the trend in other furniture markets such as home office furniture, where sales have risen by almost 40% since 2000 and bedroom furniture, which increased its sales by 37% over the same five year period.

“Today, dining rooms have become almost defunct as a place where a family enjoys an everyday meal together around the table. Scenes like those from the iconic OXO adverts featuring Lynda Bellingham, which ran for some 16 years, are now no longer a reflection of contemporary British family life and as a result have since been abandoned. Indeed, for many grazing or eating on the hoof have replaced meal times while for those who do sit down for dinner it is often merely a case of a ‘self service’ meal eaten on the lap in front of the television or a bite at a local eatery,” comments David Bird, senior market analyst at Mintel.

 

 

“But perhaps the most significant factor behind the continued decline of the dining room furniture market is the demise of the dining room itself. With the continued breakdown of traditional family models, rising divorce rates, later marriages and an ageing population more people are living alone. These smaller households are often converted properties or new builds, which often simply do not have a separate dining room and boast an open-plan living-dining-kitchen area,” adds David Bird.

For those who have a dining room it is usually kept only for formal occasions or has changed its function completely. Many have made it into a home office so that some consumers are now more likely to be found working on their laptop than eating at the dining room table. All this has contributed to the decline is sales of dining room furniture.

So, if you have an old dining room that you’d prefer to have as a home office or knock into an open plan kitchen – pop in and see us, we’re here to help.

Buy now before cinemas run out!

Anglia Factors home cinema installation with storage

“Although 2014 was a year in which British films and talent were recognised at many award ceremonies, 27 out of 73 constituencies in London had no cinema. This finding has led to suggestions that poorer people are less well served by the cinema industry in the UK.” So says the Deloitte Media Consumer 2014 Survey

The survey continues…”the number of cinemagoers has been on gradual decline since 2009. A combination of price rises and falling incomes makes the cinema relatively less accessible, which shows that higher income groups are significantly more likely to visit the cinema than low-income groups. 70% of those earning more than £55,000 a year visit the cinema at least twice a year, compared with only 39% of those who earn less than £20,000 a year”.

Home cinema installation with storage

“Not only has the number of cinemagoers been declining, the industry also faces challenging economics to build and maintain screens. A relatively small, two screen, 400-seat cinema costs around £3 million to build, and the industry has had to absorb the capital costs of digitisation over the past decade, reducing the capital available to build new infrastructure”.

Furthermore, “since 2007, the average price of a cinema ticket has risen 4.4 per cent a year, more than inflation, which averaged 3.1 per cent in the same period, and more significantly in direct opposition to median non-retired household income, which fell by 6.4 per cent between 2007/8 and 2011/12”.

Home cinema installation with storage

So, we conclude that, while a night out at the cinema is fun, it’s getting more expensive and it might not be so easy to find a cinema in the future. Why not consider a Home Cinema? No queues, free popcorn, the ability to pause for a break and all your favourite films and chums!

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Daily Telegraph World’s 20 sexiest bathrooms

Spring bathroom makeover inspiration from the Daily Telegraph – click the pic to see their 20 sexiest bathrooms

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PO research says ‘give kids more room’

Home cinema for TV & games

A fifth of UK households are home to children sharing bedrooms, according to research last summer from Post Office Mortgage’s Step-up report. For one in 10 (9 per cent) homes this is due to a lack of space, as the average square foot of a home has decreased dramatically over the last 90 years from 1,647 square feet to 925 square feet (as we’ve blogged about in the past).

Over half (58 per cent) of all adults wish their children had bigger rooms in which to study and play, and a further two thirds (63 per cent) would like to move in to a bigger house. Unfortunately, aspiring movers can expect to wait an average of four years before they will be able to upsize, while nearly a third (30 per cent) doubt they will ever be able to move up the ladder due finances or other commitments.

Bunk beds for sharing

In some households the kids rule the roost, with almost a third (31 per cent) of adults willing to take a smaller room. This seems to be especially true amongst adults (49 per cent) with children aged between one and three years old.

Storage to maximise room

Despite the warm weather (it was done in June), it appears children are more likely to spend their summer holidays indoors. More than a quarter (28 per cent) prefer to sit inside and play computer games, while one in eight (15 per cent) spend most of their time watching television. Over two thirds (65 per cent) of adults say that children in their household play outside less than they did as a child.

We can make space in bedrooms, fit out extensions and new homes. We can also help with home cinema for TV watching and computer games.

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Secret doors, rooms and storage

Ideas for your hidey hole, private rooms or just more storage. Pop in and see us, we’re here to help.

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Improving investments

In the 2011 report, A Right To Build (from ArchitectureOO and the University of Sheffield School of Architecture) we come across more evidence to support maintaining and improving your biggest investment; your home.

The first shows the fall in Local Authority building (to zero) and recent decline in private and non-profit house building and the consequent effect on the average house price which has risen despite short interruptions for recession.

The report points out that ‘Had the price of chicken inflated at the same rate as house prices since 1971 then a supermarket chicken would now cost about £47’.
It also points out that, at 83 sq m, the UK builds new houses with the smallest useful area in all of the EU except for Italy.

Which all goes to strengthen the argument to invest in your home with elements that add the most value – kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms, storage space and the best appliances.

So, to talk over improvements to your most significant asset, pop in and see us, we’re here to help.