PlumLife are part of the Great Places Housing Group housing association

Cube Homes handles luxury homes and focuses on affluent areas for their developments. PlumLife focuses more on up and coming locations and provides homes for the first-time buyer market and young families.

As part of a big push on developments in the spring of 2020, PlumLife approached North Made Studio to produce a variety of visualisations that would help to form the key marketing materials for three upcoming development sites.

All three sites were under development/construction at the same time and required a large range of deliverables to provide imagery that would help to communicate their potential. Visualisations for this PlumLife project included:

Traditional Street Scenes, depicting several different house types in one shot. It was vital that these street scenes communicated how and where the different house styles fit into the overall scheme.

House type CGIs – individual views of the different house types were produced, showing the detail of the homes and their surrounding landscaping and groundworks.

Kitchen CGIs – several views of the different kitchen options were included, showing the various layouts and finishes that would be available on different homes within the developments. Symphony kitchens is the brand spec that was requested, and our team created the kitchens to match their layouts and finishes.

Lounge/living room visualisations – several living areas and lounges for the different houses were created in CGI. Key living spaces such as these are very important to include when selling to younger buyers, they need to envisage themselves living their life within that property.

Master bedroom visualisations – the main bedroom space was also created. Another key room that is somewhere all potential buyers will want to imagine themselves residing in.

Bathroom visuals – bathrooms included Ideal Standard sanitary-ware and Bristan shower. Ensuring the CGIs matched up to the specifications was important as the bathroom is one of the main spaces within the PlumLife developments the comes with fitted items. 

North Made Studio often work with housing associations and understand how their internal systems work, this allows us to correctly manage projects, balance our workflows and use prior experience to advise the best route to take. For these 3 sites there was no defined interior styling package available. As the projects were being carried out during COVID lockdown/restrictions, the PlumLife team were not at full capacity, to overcome this limitation we worked closely with the PlumLife marketing team and utilised example imagery of previous PlumLife show homes to build a picture of what the interior styling flavour should be. Our design team fed from this and proceeded to create the interior spaces of the homes using that influence. This approach worked very well, allowing our team to produce the complete range of CGIs to a high standard whilst also ensuring that the styling within the rooms was on-trend and in keeping with previous developments PlumLife had taken to market.

Organisation of the process and project deliverables was important. With so many images required and each being provided in various draft and revision phases, it was vital that a system was in place to allow for easy access with clear labelling.

Uploads of all draft, amended and final CG imagery were sent to a cloud storage folder. Cloud storage helped to keep the project easy to manage for both our design team and the PlumLife marketing team. The benefits of having one central source for all visuals worked very well during COVID restrictions and streamlined the whole process.

This flexible way of working allowed for such quick review that it enabled considerations to be made about what visuals may be useful additions, allow North Made Studio to recommend and produce extra views of the properties to fulfil the marketing package.

PlumLife have a tradition of providing quality affordable housing, generating attractive red brick homes that offer an excellent option for buyers to get their foot on the property ladder.