A Fife-based furniture and fitout firm has raked in a record £9.4 million of orders in the past three months.
Deanestor, located in Dunfermline, is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of furniture and fitout service to the construction sector.
The new orders are spread across every sector Deanestor operates in – from build-to-rent to student accommodation, healthcare, and education – and across the UK from Glasgow to Swansea and Brighton.
Around half the projects are for repeat clients, including developers and contractors, following the company’s successful performance on earlier schemes.
Originally established in 1948 to manufacture hospital furniture for the newly established NHS, Deanestor is a market leading supplier of fixtures, fittings, and equipment, manufacturing contract furniture for bedrooms, kitchens, schools, hospitals, and laboratories.
The company has manufacturing and distribution facilities in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, spanning 165,000 sqft across three sites. It employs 150 staff and has a division in Fife to service Scottish clients and projects.
Its projects include Boclair Academy, a new £40m secondary school for 1050 pupils, under construction by Wates Construction and McLaughlin & Harvey for East Dunbartonshire Council. Both loose and fixed furniture will be supplied and fitted by Deanestor in a £1.5m contract.
In Wales, Deanestor has been awarded a £2m contract to provide bedroom furniture and fitted kitchens for Crown Student Living’s latest scheme. This is a £35m, 500-bed waterside student housing development in Swansea under construction by Midas.
In the build-to-rent sector, Deanestor has won a contract worth more than £1m for Bowmer & Kirkland to manufacture and install bespoke contemporary kitchens for a new £64m build-to-rent development in the centre of Milton Keynes. This is for Grainger plc, the UK’s largest residential landlord. Enigma Square will provide 261 purpose-designed homes for rent on a site historically occupied by the YMCA.
In 2019, Deanestor acquired the Havelock brands, including ESA McIntosh, out of administration. The Fife-based Havelock business was the UK market leader in the manufacture and installation of furniture across a diverse range of sectors including education, healthcare, hospitality, retail, banking, and student accommodation.
William Tonkinson, Managing Director of Deanestor, said, “We are pleased to report our best ever quarter for order intake. We saw a clear slowdown in orders from Spring 2020 as our contractor clients had to find new ways of working in the Covid-19 pandemic. Projects are now up and running again which has resulted in a surge in new orders.
“The construction sector has definitely been more buoyant from the start of this year and confidence is returning in all the markets we work in. Enquiries remain at a healthy level and we have a record quote book which is another very positive economic indicator.”
Other new contracts include a number of projects in the healthcare sector – work on the refurbishment of Aintree Hospital with BAM and the 3Ts redevelopment at Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton.
