Take your kitchen when you move!

Last November the Harriet F. Rees House (1888), an historic residence in Chicago, Illinois, United States was moved. Located on the once-affluent Prairie Avenue, the Rees house was built for the widow of a property developer. Ironically the house became threatened by a development project. Instead of demolishing the building, the city decided to preserve it by moving it across the street and north one block. It stuck us as a handy way of keeping your bespoke Anglia Factors interior if you just couldn’t bear to leave it!

Of course you could always get a new one!

Pop in and see us, we’re here to help.

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.

Pop in – for a new home office?

Lock up your home office

Here in wonderful Suffolk we luxuriate in beautiful countryside, have great local great food and, on average, drier weather than most in the UK. Although the roads tend to dwindle as you head north, communications are pretty good. The region is served by road, rail, air and sea and broadband is rolling out. Suffolk County Council has committed to ensuring that by the end of 2015, every property in Suffolk has access to broadband speeds of at least two megabits per second (Mbps) while 85 per cent of homes and businesses will be able to benefit from superfast speeds (24 Mbps or more).

And of course we have BT camped here at Martlesham Heath (or, ‘near Anglia Factors’ as they tell visitors:-). Their research is market-leading and it was with interest that we noticed the Guardian article earlier this year ‘Many more of us will work from home – or a cafe – says BT futurologist‘ and we quote…..

“Millard’s office is BT’s research laboratory at Adastral Park in Suffolk, a pioneering centre for technology and telecommunications, where a scale model of BT’s global network is used to test the broadband kit developed by the group and its partners. About 10% of BT’s employees work from home, a fact that helps well over 90% of mothers at the company return to their jobs after maternity leave. However, 73% of BT staff are set up to work from anywhere, with laptop access to their company files.

Much of Millard’s work is about the future of offices and business meetings, and although we are now more mobile, video calling and conference calling have made travelling to meetings less of an imperative. BT, she says, has adapted Dolby surround-sound technology for conference calls and is currently researching its effectiveness……”

“Technology, of course, also has its drawbacks. The average person is interrupted every three minutes during their working day, according to the London Business School, and our plethora of gadgets have made for more disruptions. Interrupted tasks have been found to take twice as long to finish and contain twice as many errors as uninterrupted efforts: it can take between 12 and 20 minutes to resume a complex task after being interrupted.”

So, if you want a well connected office at home with a lock on the door to prevent interruptions pop in and see us – we’re here to help.

We fit libraries too

Here’s some inspiration

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Pop in and see us we’re here to help

Home working is on the up – hooray!

The number of people working from home has increased by 13 per cent in the last five years, according to a new TUC analysis of official figures published in May. The TUC analysis of unpublished data from the Labour Force Survey shows that just over four million employees usually worked at home in 2012, a rise of 470,000 since 2007.

The South East, Scotland and Wales have seen the sharpest rise in homeworking over the last five years. While nearly two-thirds (65 per cent) of people who work from home are male, an increasing number of women are also making this career move. According to the research, the majority of homeworking jobs created in the last five years have gone to women. The rise in female homeworking is partly due to the fact that almost nine in ten (86.8 per cent) of these new jobs are part-time, says the TUC. In addition to the four million people who usually work from home, many millions more occasionally work from home, says the TUC.

Good.

We provide great home offices and above are just some examples.

Time to re-prioritise bedrooms?

We spend on average around 34% of our lives here

It is back to our old friends at the Office for National Statistics who, among many other things (they’ll have a list), measure how we use our time. Their Time Use Survey in 2005 identified that we spend on average over 8 hours asleep, 4.75 hours watching TV, resting or entertaining at home, 2 hours cooking, eating and washing up and 45 minutes washing and dressing every day. These are averages and vary by gender/age but they do imply that we should be making sure that we focus our efforts and expenditure on those areas where we pass most of our time.

• 8 hours asleep implies that, although most of it may be spent in darkness, a third of our lives are spent in the bedroom. It makes sense that we have as comfortable a bed as possible and that we accommodate this, probably king or queen-sized luxury item in a well-appointed, low maintenance, high quality room. As our families increase then it also a pleasure to give our children and house guests the same level of comfort as we expect ourselves
  

  It makes sense to lavish attention to our bedrooms

• As we will spend an average of 40 minutes a day washing and dressing having the storage and bathroom appliances that make this daily chore a pleasure makes sense if you are to look your best with the minimum of fuss
• Eating, drinking, cooking and washing up (presumably loading the dishwasher) are identified as taking up an average of 2 hours a day. Of course much more time is spent in the kitchen as it is the hub of many households. In addition to it’s utilitarian functions it’s ever more likely to have soft furnishings and a seating area as families congregate for meals
• Finally a whopping 4 and a quarter hours are spent watching TV, resting or entertaining at home. No wonder sales of large screen televisions and home cinema equipment are on the up. The old practice of having a tv-free parlour, so that visitors (the vicar) may be given the illusion that you don’t watch tv, is declining. While not exactly flaunting their flat screens many are resigned to revealing that, yes, they watch tv, dvds and play computer games. Home cinemas take it one stage further in having a single-purpose room dedicated to the pastime.
  

  Over four hours per day and rising – why not do it right?

• We are increasingly asked to furnish home offices reflecting the trend for home working and desire for homes to have a formalised location for computer/s. Despite increased tablet use many want a place for the wires, boxes and papers that surround a computer as well as a larger screen. This is converging with sophisticated tvs and may well do so in combining home offices and cinemas but for now there’s still a noticeable work/play divide that separates them.
  

  For now home offices co-exist with home cinemas but for how long?

Here at Anglia Factors we are led by our customers. As they want interiors that reflect their evolving time use (like the Anglia Factors examples here) we’ll try and stay one step ahead so that we can advise, design and supply their widening requirements.