Summer in an English country idylll; a place for cream teas, a spot of croquet, and wistfully flicking through a novel while perched on a sun lounger.
The reality is, as any actual resident will tell you, a season of whinging about grey clouds, winds that remove roofs from buildings and torrential rain.
Which is where my fascination with the latest Hozelock 40 metre auto-reel model comes in.
Designed by Hozelock’s in-house team, the final prototype, built by prototyping specialists ARRK, had to be whisked away to South Africa to find a scene of a romanticised English garden.
Even gardening products are feeding us lies!
– The design was worked on internally first, seeing as 40m is a lot of hose to reel in on a single spring
– Once a working prototype of the engineering had been built it was time to work on aesthetics
– Although it is for outdoor horticultural use, the size of the product and where it is usually positioned (ie. strapped to the side of your house) meant it had to be pretty rather than industrial
– Several variations in Photoshop later the design moved into scale foam models and an SLS prototype, all of these acting as catalysts to tweak the styling
– Essentially a two-man team, senior designer Shoji Sinclair worked on the exterior while design engineer Oliver Hyde worked on the project from the inside out
– Once happy with the model it was built in CAD using Siemens NX
– The model was then delivered to ARRK who then CNC machined and fabricated the body of the casing from ABS before painting it in Hozelock’s traditional green, while the wall bracket was made through SLS before being hand finished and painted
– The model was then shipped to the southern hemisphere for marketing photography to remind us of what summertime should actually look like
