When is a bench more than a bench?

We love benches at Furnitubes. After all, we design and produce some of the finest benches in the world today. So when we come across other people who love benches we get quite excited. This project in Amsterdam is a fantastic example of how street furniture helps to bring communities together. The Benches Collective in Amsterdam has been running for several years now, people from the community are invited to ‘adopt’ a bench for the day and to turn it into a little cafe, or a story-telling spot, or a miniature beauty salon. This year’s Bench season starts on June 5th and runs throughout the summer, we would like to wish the Dutch participants the best of luck. Furnitubes benches and community cohesion We’d love to see some of our finest Furnitubes benches being used to really fulfil their function of helping community cohesion. And the benches our in-house design team have been coming up with recently lend themselves to all sorts of mini ventures. We talk to landscape architects and designers all the time to reflect what they need in their designs. If you’re designing a scheme at the moment we can recommend the ideal furniture to support the aims of your project, and to ensure it seamlessly fits into the rest of the design The RailRoad Range Take the RailRoad range for example. The range is designed to fit together much like a rail road track. The individual units can be straight or curved to a variety of seating arrangements and are now available with add on RailRoad planters – perfect if you are planning an urban park. Or how about integrating a pop-up story telling circle into your housing scheme or school project? The possibilities are endless. The Amesbury Range One of our favourite projects was for William Morris Primary School, the Amesbury concrete seating was used to create interesting and informal seating within bright colourful surroundings in the school playground, enabling the space to be used for outdoor lessons and encouraging children to enjoy the outside world and to let their imaginations run wild. The Elements Range Of course, different projects need different solutions. Tottenham, in North London, is a busy vibrant place with all sorts of people mixing together to build a strong community, but until recently Tottenham Green was underused, and uninviting. The London Borough of Haringey decided to create a civic heart for Tottenham on this space, and to construct an area which encourage performances, play and a cafe culture. Having the right seating was essential to achieving that goal. We were delighted our Elements range was selected for the development because it offers the versatility and style required. We also custom-designed integrated seats within low level concrete retaining walls to suit the site. It’s certainly made a positive difference to community events in Tottenham. A bench is NEVER just a bench The reality is, a bench is never just a bench. A bench is a place to sit and watch the world go by, a place to rest on a busy day, a place to meet friends or lovers, a place to read in companionable solitude with just a book for company. Seating gives users a reason to pause and rest within the busy public realm environment. At Furnitubes we understand that; we will always aim to design and produce high quality, stylish and functional street furniture aimed to help improve the daily lives of public citizens. Our SmartSpace brand is capable of just that – all products in the range are innovative by design whilst also being capable of being arranged to meet the varying and changing requirements of today’s outdoor spaces.