Traditional Coir Door Mats
A Short History of Make An Entrance making Traditional Coir Door Mats.
19th Century: Traditional Coir Door Mats
Men Making Traditional Coir Door Mats at the Victorian Royal Institute for the Blind. Picture from State Library Victoria, Australia.
We have been making coconut door mats for a very long time. In fact, the roots of Make An Entrance stretch a long way, all the way back to the 19th Century.
Originally partially sighted and blind people made traditional coir door mats in workshops around the UK run by the charity Royal National Institute for the Blind.
The workshops offered the opportunity for people to gain skills and experience in a work environment.
Our research shows that these projects happened across the globe. The images on this page depict men working at the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind in Australia.
The images from the State Library of Victoria are how we imagine the UK workshops would have looked at that time too.
1980's & 1990's:
Fast-forward to the 1980s, when Make An Entrance founding father, Allen Burlton, ran a number of these charitable workshops for the blind.
They produced Hand made Coir Mats and Cut to Size Coir Matting amongst other hand-made products, sadly, many of the workshops closed in the 1990s, due to changes in charity funding.
Allen recognised the importance of the opportunities that the workshops provided for people who worked there. So he decided to continue running them. They solely concentrated on the production of hand-stitched Traditional Coir Door Mats and Cut to Size Coir Matting.
This type of mat looks very like the mats that used to be made to ride down Helter Skelters! Pictures from State Library Victoria, Australia.
2000's
Fast-forward again to the birth of the online era. In 2005 Allen's son and daughter-in-law, Stuart and Samantha Burlton founded Make An Entrance Ltd as it is known today.
As a result of moving online, the business grew rapidly, using a number of workshops and warehouses around the UK.
Today, Make An Entrance supplies expertly crafted Made to Measure Coir Mats to homes and businesses too. We are very proud to say that the National Trust chooses us to supply many of their properties too.
We deliver our huge range of traditional and contemporary matting across the UK and Europe.
But, no matter how our business changes and develops over time, we never forget the fact that we are a family run business based on skills and expertise.
We still stitch our traditional mats by hand in the same way we always have.