Rose Garden

The ExtraCare Charitable Trust is the pioneer of village communities and their approach is founded on the charitable principle that age, health or financial means shouldn’t be a barrier to achieving an enjoyable quality of life in later years. Formed in 1988, it currently operates 28 supported housing schemes and retirement villages throughout the greater Midlands area and the North. The Rose Garden in Hereford is the latest addition to the scheme, opening the doors to 91 apartments in 2008.

The Challenges

As a new development, The Rose Garden needed a full voice and data infrastructure to support 91 apartments, communal village areas and management offices. Being a specialist housing environment, additional services needed to be considered in the design to cater for fire alarms, call warden and secure door access systems.

For telephony, each apartment needed it’s own handset and external phone number and call information needed to be captured to allow for accurate billing of calls to each apartment. Wireless telephony was also required to ensure that wardens and management were contactable all around the site, both for security and efficiency purposes.

The overriding challenge was to ensure that the infrastructure put in place would provide the highest levels of security for residents and enable the wardens and staff to provide the best possible level of service to each resident.