Garden Centre Design & Build

Client: Bell Plantation Garden Centre

Location: Towcester, NN12 6GX

Project overview:

• Consultation on continued expansion of site (six projects).
• Handled planning applications.
• Design, manufacture and build.

What we have done

We have been designing and building for Bell Plantation since 2012, with six different projects completed together.

Long-term planning and foresight has been a key element of the consultancy role provided, always considering on each new project what may follow in the future, ensuring buildings were able to be easily adapted for new uses as the site has evolved.

This has seen portal frame buildings and glass canopies adapted and converted to meet building controls and Part L regulations to provide extra indoor retail space, as and when required. Areas which were built in glass initially were done so with the foresight of being able to convert at minimal cost and disruption to a busy, open centre.

Over the years we have helped Bell Plantation grow from a garden centre into a retail and leisure destination offering a garden centre, café, kitchen and bathroom showrooms, art spaces, a children’s play centre, a gymnasium, a fish and reptile centre and a hot tub showroom, amongst others.

What our client says

Jethro Warren, development manager at Bell Plantation, said: “CambridgeHOK have really helped us grow. We’ve had a really good consistent partnership with them. They understand our requirements and they can interpret it and from our basic explanation of what we want into something which is really impressive.

“We’re not developers, we’re not experts in the field at all, but we do know what we want, we are practical people and we like to think we should be able to understand the process.

“We’ve had the same guys on site and just one change of project manager in all the time we’ve been working with HOK. It just builds trust, it means that we can give good feedback, they understand our requirements in great detail and that consistency throughout has made our lives easier.

“They have always also been competitively priced too, so they have never taken that relationship for granted. That’s why it has continued for so many years. We’re really happy with the buildings we love being in them and retailing from them. They are simple and effective.”