With over half a million students spread across almost 50 university campuses, London has been ranked as the best student city in the world for many years. However, in addition to offering diverse courses and exceptional career opportunities, the UK capital also has to prepare for a wave of international students that come in each year. With a third of the UK’s total overseas student population located in London, parents of these students often face the challenge of finding suitable accommodation for their children. Even if they find the right property, getting it furnished remotely from another part of the world is still a headache.
Furniture plays a silent yet crucial role in the overall learning experience, as students need to be in a comfortable space to focus on their academic goals. Most overseas, especially non-EU students, are already grappling with the challenge of acclimatising to the English weather, homesickness and a significant change in their socio-cultural settings. As parents, you can help by creating a comfortable living environment for them indoors.
At InStyle Direct, we have over two decades of experience in providing high-quality, cost-effective, durable and sustainable furnishing solutions to concerned parents like yourself. Well, before we share our solutions, let’s take a moment to understand the different pain points of overseas parents when they set out to create an ideal student pad for their children.
Time constraints: Parents of overseas students preparing for a new academic term do not enjoy the luxury of weeks and months to get their property ready and may need to buy and install furniture in just a few days. This rushed timeline can lead to further delays if there is a mismatch in the items delivered or if any furniture needs to be returned.
Remote management: While selecting the right furniture can be quite the task, coordinating the entire delivery, installation and tracking progress from another country makes it all the more stressful.
Comfort and safety: Parents have to ensure the comfort and safety of their children in a foreign country and would want to avoid multiple agents visiting and delivering different items individually, interrupting the academic workflow of their children.
Cost implications: After spending time selecting the right furniture and comparing costs across several online retailers, you will still need to purchase these items separately. Even if you bill it in a single cart, the products could be sourced from different warehouses and delivered individually, incurring multiple delivery and service charges.
Getting it right: After going through all the logistical hassles and spending significantly, there’s still a chance of the final output not being up to the mark in terms of design cohesion due to the lack of local knowledge and professional guidance. For example, setting up the right window dressing can take a week if you follow a DIY approach instead of instructing a competent furnishing pack company that can do it in a day.
Now that we know the challenges overseas parents face when furnishing student properties, let us look at the solutions a reliable furniture pack company like InStyle Direct can provide to make this process easy and effective.
One-stop solution
Whether it is about saving time and money or ensuring quality furniture and professional design aesthetics, we have you covered on all fronts. Based on your needs and budget, we have comprehensive student furniture packages starting at a competitive price of £3395+VAT. From private homes to purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA), our durable furniture packs are specially curated for student residences in London.
Assured cost savings
When you tally and compare the collective price of individual furniture items against the extensive inventory of our packages, you will realise opting for comprehensive student furniture packs is more affordable. To provide a clear example, we compared our Gold Range for a one-bed apartment with similar products, individually listed on the British furniture store, John Lewis‘ website. The findings revealed a remarkable 22% cost savings after including the delivery and assembly costs incurred when ordering from the latter.
High-quality, design-led furniture
As a parent, ensuring high-quality furniture and effective design for your child to excel at their academic pursuits is always a top priority. We will support you in this endeavour as we did for our client in Reading, where our dedicated interior designer and project manager combined forces to provide design-led solutions. Together, they helped the client create an appealing two-bedroom unit for her son, who was about to start university soon.
Quick installation and customisation
In the above mentioned blog, where we compared costs with retailers like John Lewis, we also compared the lead time retailers take to deliver and install furniture. While many retailers can take weeks to get your furniture, owing to large inventories and stocking issues, we can turn around an order in just a day or two at max. Additionally, just because it is a package, you do not have to worry about any compulsion to buy things you may not need. Our packs are flexible and you can easily opt to add or remove items as per your needs.
Here’s how you can transform your property in five simple steps
Our objective when furnishing a student property is simple and straightforward. We take care of the entire process from selecting the right furniture that suits your property to its delivery, installation and aftercare services. Here’s how we ensure complete peace of mind for overseas parents.
Reliable services
We could go on and on about our services, but we will allow our clients to tell you about our work themselves. Here’s what some of our happy overseas clients had to say after their experience with InStyle Direct.
“We are overseas home buyers and used InStyle Direct to design and install a Gold-standard furniture package for our new apartment. InStyle did a really good job and we can highly recommend them. The furniture and the curtains are very well designed and of the expected good quality. Our special thanks go to Mark Parry, who was very helpful in advising us from the beginning and organising everything very professionally, and to Samera, who did a fine job with the actual design work. The installation, then, was made exactly on time and with no problems at all. So, we could immediately use the apartment when we arrived for our first visit in London.” – Manfred Nuske
“As an overseas home buyer, it is not easy to manage furniture installation remotely without a letting agent. James and Alex are super-efficient. They help me liaise with my concierge and confirm back and forth when things are not moving on. Nicole from the design team got excellent taste and made my home look very cosy. A real money-worth-the-value package. Excellent experience!” -WJ Hu
Comprehensive support
As an overseas parent, ensuring the seamless transition of your property into a welcoming student residence is a big responsibility and you have our complete support during the entire process, from taking accurate measurements to delivering as promised and on time. If you have any complaints about a product or need to return furniture, our prompt customer service team will help you manage everything from anywhere in the world. As for your children, they can simply move in with their suitcase, knowing everything else is taken care of.
Here’s a video of us with Benham & Reeves, one of the UK’s leading estate agents, discussing different ways InStyle Direct can help their clients and other landlords secure high-calibre tenants across London.
Student accommodations require a high level of attention to detail as they need to be both functional and stylish. Whether it is providing a sturdy desk or installing a convertible sofa bed that serves as a storage unit for books and project materials, we understand what students need and can tailor our solutions for different types of student accommodations. If you are a parent trying to understand what your child may need, we have a guide on budget-friendly furnishing solutions to help you. We also have some insightful tips on how you can creatively convert your flat into the perfect student pad for your child.
With InStyle Direct, you are assured of quality, variety, efficiency and cost savings. With the new academic year in the UK due to commence in the next few weeks, overseas parents will be looking for expertise like ours to get their properties ready. If you are a parent looking to transform your property into the perfect student pad before university starts, get in touch with us today!
