About Us

In the beginning

Livng Homes started life as a mail order catalogue business, initially called Selective Buyers and later renamed as Consumer Buyers. Selective Buyers started trading in 1965, with the business becoming known as Consumer Buyers in 1968. Both businesses operated from purpose-built offices in Pilton, Somerset. This was in the days long before the internet and even personal computers had been dreampt up.

Living Homes was born

With changes in shopping habits and the desire to deal with customers face-to-face, the decision was made to expand and begin the search for suitable retail premises. This was the first time that the Living Homes brand was used and the first store opened in Kingsmead Square, Bath, in 1970.

Expansion (and contraction)

The first retail store was followed by a second in 1972, when Living Homes took over the established retailer Payne & Holder in the High Street, Weston-super-Mare. 

In the same year and in preparation for the imminent introduction of VAT when the UK joined the European Economic Community, Consumer Buyers became an incorporated company, Consumer Buyers Limited.

Following the success of the first two stores, the search began for larger retail premises and in the mid-seventies, this came to fruition with the purchase of a derelict ex-school building located in a prominent position in the High Street, Street. Following extensive repair and rennovation, the new store opened for business in 1977. 

Because the new store was significantly larger than the two that went before, the amount of business that it was able to generate soon dwarfed that of the previous stores. It wasn't long before the difficult decision was made to leave the two original smaller stores and focus all efforts on the Street store. 

Followed by more expansion

Within a number of years it became apparent that even the new Street store wasn't large enough to sell the complete product range and in particular furniture, which required masses of space. As a consequence the Street store continued to expand. We re-located our warehouse from 147 High Street and converted the building firstly to a Flooring Centre and then our Bedroom Centre. Subsequently we purchased the vacated Crockers shoe shop in the High Street, with the space being used for our Electrical and Flooring Centres. This finally allowed us to have separate showrooms for Furniture, Bedrooms, Electrical & Flooring. 

Our return to Weston

With the demise of a number of multiple furniture chains in the early 2000's, we saw an opportunity to return to Weston. Initially we were located in the old Courts store in Dolphin Square, but when the square was demolished, we re-located to a modern retail unit situated behind the Asda and Waitrose supermarkets.

Although this store is significantly smaller than the total area we now occupy in Street, it gives us the advantage of having all of our products (excluding Flooring and Sound & Vision) under one roof, in a modern, fully accessible building with ample car parking.