Wonky wardrobes and tilting tables – how we hate putting furniture together. MATT CLARK meets a woman whose self-assembly nightmare inspired a career change.

FLAT PACK are two words guaranteed to send shivers down most spines. We’ve all been there; the picture promises so much and the one on display looks fantastic. But once we get home and open the packaging, it’s downhill all the way.

Baffling shapes spill out, followed by a hundred bolts and a hundred and one nuts. There’s enough dowel to build a small bridge and instructions that do anything but instruct.

It’s so bad, according to a recent survey by RatedPeople.com, that nearly half of us feel unable to assemble any form of flat pack furniture, while most admit they would be happy to pay someone to do the job.

The rest of us mumble a few choice words and graze our knuckles. Then we scratch our heads at the sight of all those leftovers and our wonky new wardrobe.

For Penny Roberts the deconstructed culprit was a hen coop; or rather a collection of anonymous planks and a set of shoddily photocopied instructions.

It took two days of mumbled words and grazed knuckles before Penny fathomed everything out.

“You had to tack it together and although it was quite expensive, it just wasn’t built to last,” she says.

“It was a bodge job and disappointing. I soon began to notice a distinct decline in my husband’s enthusiasm for poultry-related DIY.”

With good reason. The run wasn’t big enough, the roof leaked and there were plenty of trips to B&Q before the coop was even half decent.

Perseverance and ingenuity eventually made it safe for use and Penny adopted four chickens from the British Hens Welfare Trust.

Her ‘girls’ seemed happy enough in their new home but it was too hard to clean and Penny was for ever adding clips and bolts to keep out vermin.

All the time a thought kept nagging at her mind: “Surely I could do better than this?”

“It was a bit make-do and I was just trying to find a solution to protect the hens,” says Penny. “I also thought if you are going to have a coop in the garden, you want it to look as pretty as the hens.”

So Penny scribbled a few sketches before coming up with her ‘ideal’ hen house.

It had to be light and efficient; spacious and cute. She wanted a full-size door and no more unreachable nooks and crannies for pests to thrive in.

Then came the tricky bit; putting those ideas into practice.

“The prototype was finished last March and it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. My son Charlie agreed and we lost no time in re-housing our girls from the old coop.”

Penny’s designer hen house is more like a tiny cabin with its thatched roof, cottage-style windows and red chimney pot.

“When I take breakfast out in the morning the girls are all standing on their perches, looking out, as if to say ‘what time do you call this?’ It really is like being in a posh hotel and waiting for room service.”

It was so good people began asking for one. This was a Eureka moment and Penny realised she had spotted a perfect business opportunity. Now she has given up her day job to design and sell Henny Penny Hen Houses.

“The coops are made by craftsmen just outside York and are constructed to suit the chickens’ needs first. My job is to take note of customer’s feedback and preferences.”

These are many and varied. Take the client who wanted hers finished in Farrow and Ball paint – eggshell naturally. Then there was one who asked if she could have central heating.

But a recent enquiry from the Middle East topped the lot by leaving Penny wondering how she can add air-conditioning as an option.

Each coop has a build number on a plaque above the door and, best of all, Henny Penny Hen Houses come ready made. So there is no flat-pack misery, no dodgy instructions, no mumbled words and no more bruised knuckles.

“To me chickens complete the garden and it’s lovely to see them poddling about. Of course they produce the best eggs you’ve ever tasted and if you want to do a good deed why not rescue some of the 16 million battery hens in the UK who need a home?”

These chickens are slaughtered after their first birthday, because they are considered past their best. But apart from it being an appalling fate, Penny says it’s also nonsensical; the birds still have plenty of years laying left in them, just not on a factory scale.

Sadly only 60,000 of our battery hens are rescued each year and Penny is keen to convince more people to adopt them.

She says they not only make adorable companions, but they are a bargain. A good breed of hen costs up to £9, but rescue hens are free, apart from a small donation.

You need to be patient though. After being stuck in a space no bigger than an A4 sheet of paper, these chickens can hardly move their legs; they are understandably timid and it takes a while to adjust to their newfound freedom.

“It’s shocking when you first see them. They look so poorly and dishevelled when you first pick them up and you just think how can this be allowed to happen?”

Penny now has 13 rescue hens, along with ten posh ones, as she calls them, and to complete the picture there is Henry, a magnificent cockerel.

Charlie named one of the hens Fluffy Fat Bottom, for reasons he says are obvious, and Penny is about to write a children’s book telling Fluffy’s story from confined days as a battery hen to her new life in the fresh, open spaces of North Yorkshire.

“A lot of people are unaware of what happens to battery hens. You’ve heard of Children In Need, well what about Chickens In Need?

“Saving one hen may not change the world, but it will change the world for that one hen.”

And waiting for her is a house to crow about.


• Henny Penny hen houses range in price from £690 to £1,490. To find out more, visit hennypennyhenhouses.co.uk

• Penny also has a blog which covers her real-life chicken keeping adventures at bloghennypennyhenhouses.co.uk
Twitter: @hennypennyhens
Facebook: henny-penny-hen-houses

• To find out how you can rescue factory chickens and more about the British Hen Welfare Trust visit: bhwt.org.uk