Bespoke seating central to business park improvement

BALI Registered Affiliate Furnitubes’ designers collaborated with ASA Landscape Architects on the landscape upgrades of Winnersh Triangle Business Park located in Reading, Berkshire. A key feature within the scheme was the extensive provision of seating to encourage staff to use the outside spaces, as social spaces during breaks and even for outdoor meetings.

Project details: 
Located 5 miles east of the centre of Reading, Winnersh Triangle is a 1.5 million sq ft mixed-use business park and home to major headquarter buildings, grade A offices and start-up suites for business services, IT and engineering sectors.

Project challenges: 
Landscape architects ASA initially contacted Furnitubes with a view to specifying our popular RailRoad seating range at building 210 on the Wharfedale Road South site. Furnitubes designers met with ASA in order to gain a fuller understanding of the context of the site and specific requirements of the seating. Even though RailRoad offers many configuration options as standard, Furnitubes' design team recommended that a bespoke seating solution was needed to meet the design aspirations of the landscape architects.

Our Process:
Furnitubes’ designer set about designing a new suite of products specifically to suit the site – including straight and curved benches, seats with backs and loungers – both as individual items and as components for continuous long seating runs. Sketch proposals (including 3D digital models) and budget costs were offered at the first stage, to ensure that we had accurately interpreted the style of seating required and also to check that the costs would be affordable within the scheme budget. The designs were modified over a period of several months and drawings of the final solutions were supplied in digital format for insertion into the CAD site plan for setting out purposes.

Solution(s)
The final design solutions were the result of a collaborative approach between our in-house designers and ASA’s landscape architects. All seating forms combined steel frames, zinc thermal sprayed and in a polyester powder-coated finish, and expertly crafted iroko hardwood timbers with an ultraviolet protective treatment to preserve a rich colouration over an extended period. The Winnersh 200s site has been transformed from a dull and underused area into a vibrant, contemporary green outdoor space that will be enjoyed by staff at the site for many years to come.