A 7,500 sq ft children’s play centre with licensed restaurant, party rooms, sports and disco areas, treehouse and a giant slide is to open in Altrincham town centre.
The Treehouse is to open in a vacant unit on George Street that was once partially home to department store Woolworths and will create up to 35 jobs.
Work began on the site – next door but one to the new Everyman Cinema – in May and it’s hoped the new venue could be open in six weeks’ time.
Hale-based Samah Abadi, who with husband Adam is behind The Treehouse, said the inspiration for the new venture came from her experiences in “soulless” soft play centres “drinking bad coffee and eating frozen pizza”.
She said: “We want to create a haven for children and adults alike, but actually more than that, we want to create a community hub.
“As a new mother, I felt the isolation and loneliness of being at home with my baby after my husband went back to work. With such unpredictable weather, I found the selection of places to go to with a baby very limited. I craved somewhere I could go to all the time, without having to ask myself daily what to do to entertain us both.”
The play area will be more “Swiss Family Robinson adventure playground”, with rope bridges, wooden houses, an “enormous” tree to climb up and a slide to take kids back down.
The restaurant will feature locally sourced dishes including stonebaked pizzas made in its own pizza oven, all-day brunches, steaks, salads, coffee and cake, while the bar will sell wines, beers and cocktails.
There’ll be another cafe upstairs, a sports area, a disco, party rooms and classes for everything from dance to crafts.
A ‘pyjama club’ on Friday and Saturday nights will also show movies for the kids upstairs while parents have dinner and drinks downstairs.
Adam Abadi, who also runs a Hale-based tour operator, told us that while entry pricing was still being finalised, it will be comparable to existing soft play centres in the area.
Wife Samah was a geneticist at Manchester University before launching her own sun tan cream import business, but is now fully focused on the new project after spotting a gap in the market following the birth of son Jesse, now two.
Adam told us: “We’re really looking forward to being open. If someone had come up to me and said this is opening in Altrincham I would have been amazingly excited.
“It’ll be a place you can go as a family where the kids will be happy, the parents will be happy and the grandparents will be happy.”
