Maplewood Court: luxury care in the Garden of England

Oakland Care’s new Maplewood Court Care Home is situated in a quiet residential area close to the centre of Maidstone – Kent’s largest town, and home to over 100,000 people. I visited the £7.3m build in July to take a look around and to chat with Richard Dooley, development director at Oakland Care, and Phil Holding, managing director of Horizon Construction, which was responsible for the construction of the new home.

Oakland Care operates care homes across Essex, Kent, East Sussex, and Oxfordshire. Maplewood Court is the provider’s eighth operational home, with a further two currently under construction. Oakland obtained planning permission in January 2020, demolishing the singlestorey care home that stood on the site previously. Having only just opened to a handful of residents, Maplewood Court is an impressive two-storey building that incorporates distinctive grey Kent stone into its construction. Set in newlylandscaped gardens, the home is designed to accommodate up to 72 residents, with a phased increase in numbers likely to take between a year and eighteen months. As for fees, they are around £1,400 per week, rising a little for dementia - or ‘memory’ - care. In terms of staffing, Maplewood Court will see between 80 and 90 people employed in a mix of full and part time roles once the home is operating at capacity

For Oakland, the location of Maplewood Court is key. As Oakland’s Richard Dooley puts it: “We’re a growing business and we like to develop homes in small clusters, which offers us operational efficiencies. We’ve just finished a project in Swanley and we have a further home under construction in Hildenborough which will provide a small cluster of homes in the Kent area. We also have a group of homes around the north section of the M25 in Chigwell, Enfield, and Loughton, which provides us another small   cluster. Our growth plans are to keep adding new homes to the portfolio each year and we are continually looking for suitable sites.”