Third furniture store to open in luxury ‘village’

A THIRD furniture retailer is planning to open a new showroom on the Calthorpe Estate in Edgbaston.

Neptune is set to open a the two-storey shop in a former office building in Harborne Road next door to Oka, the high-end brand co-founded by David Cameron’s mother-in-law which announced before Christmas it was launching on the estate.

In addition, Sofa.com also unveiled plans last month to renovate office space in nearby Calthorpe Road to create a new shop.

Neptune was founded in 1996 in Wiltshire and designs and manufactures its own furniture as well as operating 17 showrooms across England, with two more due to open in Cheltenham and Wimbledon in the coming weeks.

The Edgbaston outlet, at 16-18 Harborne Road, would be the company’s first store in the West Midlands although it had looked at opening a shop at a different building in the same road in 2015 but this never came to fruition.

A report prepared by consultancy Brooke Smith Planning in support of the new application said: “British luxury furniture operator Neptune would complete a high-quality lifestyle retail parade, with other operators across the road in the Morrisons building.

“Neptune sees the adjacency to other such operators as key to customer experience but also to the joint success of Harborne Road and in line with both Calthorpe Estates’ and the local authority’s aspirations for Edgbaston.

“Such bespoke retailers have not previously been interested in locating within Birmingham as they did not consider there to be a potential location which would align with their quality and values.

“It is unique in the UK for Oka and Neptune to have the potential to be located next to one another in a unique, high-quality location.”

This is the latest development in the Calthorpe Estates’ project to create a high-end ‘Edgbaston Village’ which comprises new shops, houses and public space on the roads around Greenfield Crescent.