Nursing home furniture needs to fill a whole host of special needs: from its look, to its ease of cleaning and durability. The best furniture for nursing homes answers all three of these criteria affordably and well – allowing residents and temporary patients alike to live in the closest comfort they can to their own homes, whilst affording nursing staff the manoeuvrability and solidity they require in order to do their job effectively. As such, good furniture for these places presents quite a design and construction problem – though one, fortunately, that is being answered well by some new corporate furniture web sites: including the UK’s own Triangle Interiors.

Triangle, which has made a pretty successful business out of designing and supplying bulk furniture for conference centres and hospitals, has recently added a quality range of nursing home furniture to its list. The range answers the three design criteria of good nursing furnishings extremely well. Triangle offer living room chairs, for example that have clearly been designed to replicate the kind of chair one might expect to find in the home of a person of that generation: pleasant, naturally coloured arm chairs, with high backs and furled armrests. They look almost indistinguishable from the “real” thing – but are stuffed with ergonomic design features that ensure ease of use in the nursing area situation. This nursing home furniture is easy to clean – it can be wiped down and disinfected in minutes. It’s extremely durable, which means it holds its brightness and colour, as well as its working features, for a length of time that makes it economically practical to order. And it can be altered to make taking a patient out of it, in an emergency situation, extremely efficient and easy.

There are also ranges of bedroom furniture, built with the same three golden rules in mind. All the beds are comfortable, the tables are ornamental and simply built – but everything works in accordance with the daily requirements of a nursing establishment. This is nursing home furniture at its best: designed to look and feel like “normal” home furnishings, but well capable of withstanding the more intense stresses and strains of supporting less mobile patients. In effect, it’s a trick, albeit a very kind hearted one: hospital furnishings, when all is said and done, made up to look like home decoration.

This, of course, is the most important trait of all. A nursing home is a place intended to give dignity, peace and as much happiness as possible to people who can no longer live in their own houses or flats. As such, the better ones are trying to take care of a wealth of memories and habits – and to detract attention from the frustrations inherent in having to be looked after. Nursing home furniture has a vital role to play in this illusion. Everyone knows that it is, really, hospital grade, designed to facilitate treatment rather than ornament: but, in the best of all possible worlds, it’s also reminiscent of the homes the patients have been forced to leave.