Unexpected Fabrics for Care and Dementia Design
To TAD followers in the US and Australia, apologies in advance for the number of times in which you will find color spelled colour in this post. When in Rome…
New furnishing fabric collections are usually brought to the international market-place bi-annually. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the care home or, specifically, dementia sector. If you’re able to get competitively priced soft-furnishing fabrics and fire-treat them in accordance with the regulations in your country, as well as back-coating and stain-proofing them where necessary, then the possibilities expand exponentially.
GP&J Baker is offering a fabric of garden ‘postcards,’ perfect for early dementia units (only) as a memory jog. It’s called ‘Opera Postcards’ and all three colourways are again soft and muted. The fabric could easily be used in spaces adjacent to a garden with stronger colours on upholstered furnishings or even used stretched on frames as wall art.
Distributed from the United States, Beacon Hill (part of the Robert Allen group) offers an Austrian Teflon®-coated fabric called ‘Soo Locks’ which they have reduced the range to a single Teal colourway, which was the best of the bunch anyway. The pattern is an abstract soft and muted landscape and a nice way of bringing the beauty of the outside, indoors.
Meanwhile, in Germany, Crèation Baumann have been hard at work developing what they claim to be the “world’s largest range of opaque, sheer or printed acoustic fabrics.” They are all produced to ISO/EN 354, ISO 11654 ad DIN EN 29053 standards and are tested in a reverberation chamber with detailed reports and measurement results available.
With many care home new builds featuring floor to ceiling glass and non-slip vinyl flooring or other hard surface materials, acoustics have been of concern to architects and designers for several years now. Certainly, professional acousticians can assist but, in my experience, not all build budgets accommodate this extra consultant.
There are many approaches to dealing with acoustics and many of these will be addressed in future blogs, but in the meantime fabrics like these can provide a ‘quick win.’