Review of 2025 at rhbr

Let’s take a look at 2025! And quite a year it has been with so many different strands of activity. We can safely say there has never been a dull moment.

However, if we had to pick our three words to best summarise the year’s activity, they would be Banquette, Modular, Reupholstery.

Banquettes feature somewhere in pretty much every project now. It has always been a favourite form of seating in hospitality environments, but the post-covid transformation of commercial interiors has seen banquette become a standard feature in most office settings as well. Whether fixed installations or free-standing, long runs against a wall, small niches or back-to-back booth-style arrangements, the joy of banquette seating is the limitless possibilities it affords for space configuration and for making it an integral design feature in any environment.

Modular seating is the other big element in most projects. So many different shapes and sizes to play with to create soft seating areas in every type of environment, from reception to libraries, collaboration spaces to hospitals.

Reupholstery has become a huge part of our business. If anyone had told us even as recently as two years ago that re-use would have become such a priority consideration across pretty much every sector, we probably wouldn’t have believed it but it is heartening to know that it is now very much front of mind. In the light of the recent National Emergency Briefing on the impact of climate change it is quite clear that these sorts of initiatives have to become mainstream. We have talked many times about the importance of designing with re-use in mind and continue to be shocked by the “inconsiderate” design of many of the items we get asked to look at but, even so, we are rarely stumped!

On the plus side, though, we have also had the pleasure of bringing back to life some beautifully made “old school” pieces for a few of the Oxford colleges.