Building a new play space, be it a traditional playground, splash park, nature park or social gathering area, can be a confusing and difficult task. Park N Play Design believes in making this process as effortless as possible for our valued clients.
Out of all the tens of thousands of playgrounds and parks across Canada, only a small percentage of them are inclusive, accessible, and designed for use by the entire community.
While it's easier than ever to get a cookie-cutter design for your upcoming project, it's harder than ever to build a playground or park that can serve the entire community for decades to come. We're on a mission to change that.
Most organizations have two challenges when it comes to building inclusive and accessible playgrounds and parks.
Understanding the latest safety, accessibility, and inclusivity regulations and best practices
Choosing the right equipment and designs for your specific school, community, or park
That's why we built Park N Play Design—to give organizations like yours a partner that you can trust to deliver a top-notch playground or park that meets the needs of those using it.
In the last twenty years we've helped thousands of organizations (like yours) design, build, and install 3000+ playgrounds and parks. I'd love for you to be our next success story.
Michelle Poffenroth
Founder & President of Park N Play Design
Play offers dynamic, hands-on experiences that provide people of all ages opportunities to explore, learn, and make connections within their community. It is through play that we inspire the mental and emotional mind, motivate the physical body, and discover an awareness of spirit and equality. Now more than ever, it is critical to study play behaviour, seek knowledge on the power of play, and promote best practices that advocate lifelong play across our diverse communities.
When you choose Park N Play Design, you don't just get hands-on, personalized service for every project and budget, but you also get a partner that truly cares about promoting inclusion. It is our mission here at Park N Play Design to uphold the highest standards of equality—not just through our inclusive designs, but also through our entire organizational structure.
We like to approach and assess each project on its needs, in order to make sure we are building the right play space for the right environment. We offer everything from supervised installs, volunteer installs, to full turn key installations.
Our aim at Park N Play design is to make the process as stress-free as possible. Regardless of your project budget or size, you get the exact same level of commitment and enthusiasm.
All our play spaces are built to Canadian Safety Association (CSA) Standards which ensures all our materials and manufacturing process are built to the highest stringent safety guidelines to allow for the safe enjoyment of all our play spaces.
Exciting, Epic Adventures Start with A Well Planned Play Space Project. We work with you to help bring your playground designs to life.
We make our process as fun and collaborative as we can! We start off the process with the basic requirements of each project. We address the budget and site size in question. Then we thoroughly research the history of the site to see if we can incorporate some of that history into the creative process.
Our visionary artists then take our research as the design inspiration and theme of the new project. Once the idea and vision are formed we take our idea and create a technical drawing/blueprint of the new space. From there it’s into the world of 3D where you can see first-hand the design come to life. We love to use colors as an accent to bring the play space to life. Our communities are creative, diverse, and colorful. We believe that the playgrounds and parks we design should reflect the uniqueness of each community.
Canada’s greatest strength is the diversity of our people and our communities. Bringing together and combining our diverse experiences and cultures opens the door for never before seen creativity and innovation.
Our team has been building parks and playgrounds for our diverse communities for the last 20 years, and we’ve learned a thing or two about the power of inclusion and diversity. Sure, inclusion and diversity are important to delivering award-winning designs, but they’re also important for making sure that we can anticipate, empathize, and understand the diverse needs of our communities.
That’s why Park N Play Design is committed to the Government of Canada’s “50 - 30 Challenge”. The 50 - 30 Challenge is a commitment to increase the representation and inclusion of diverse groups within the workplace.
The 50 - 30 Challenge asks that organizations aspire to two goals:
Gender parity (50%) for senior management
Significant representation (30%) for senior management of other under-represented groups including Aboriginal peoples and persons with disabilities
Read more about the 50-30 Challenge
We’re proud to announce that we’ve met both of those goals, and 47% of our total workforce is made up of individuals from under-represented groups. But we’re not stopping there, Park N Play Design is committed to ensuring that our workforce represents the diversity of our communities, now, and always.
Danica brings an enthusiastic approach to play, believing in making the process of working on building fun as stress-free as possible.
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Shelley has spent the past 13 years designing and building custom playgrounds and managing full turnkey park constructions, and identifies herself as a "playoligist" (def.- urban dictionary)!
She approaches each and every opportunity with a creative spirit and pays extra attention to details concerning budget, site conditions, and elevated surprises of fun. Shelley is passionate about equal play for all and was awarded the 2015 GameTime “Sales Person of the Year”, a testament to her dedication to the industry. She has designed over 100 projects in Northern Alberta and Northern Saskatchewan, and is determined to never duplicate an experience, ensuring each design is customized to meet her clients' needs.
Shelley is also a passionate fan of Dolly Parton!
Tim has been with Park N Play for over 10 years, and brings his wealth of experience to each and every project. Tim is a firm believer in an empathy-first approach to playground design.
Tim is married to his lovely wife Jodi, with whom he has two beautiful children, Noah and Rowan, who serve as the first playground test subjects for all of Tim's projects.
Community is something very important to both Jodi and Tim. Jodi sits on the board for the Westgate Community Association, and Tim is a longstanding member of the Board of Directors for the Nickle Family Foundation. Together, they enjoy working to make their community stronger and more diverse every day.
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Robert (Bob) McLarty began his engineering career working in the engineering and sales department of a major Ontario industrial fabrication plant where his responsibilities included sales, design, project management, and commisioning of custom industrial machinery.
Bob brings many professional skills and assets to Park N Play, including experience as an Account Manager responsible for the commercial sales, repairs, parts management, and on-site builds of large industrial applications.
Bob graduated from Sheridan College of Applied Arts and Technology in Brampton as a Mechanical Engineering Technologist.
Bob is married, has three children and lives in the Shelburne Ontario.
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Michelle founded Park N Play Design in 2002.
As a forward thinking entrepreneur who loved being outdoors, it made perfect sense to Michelle to build a career doing what she loved - designing and building exceptional play spaces.
After raising two children, Michelle understood the influence a well-designed play space had in the development of healthy, confident, and well-rounded children. She turned that understanding into a corporate philosophy at Park N Play Design.
Throughout the years Michelle has inspired her team to practice "Thoughtful Design" in creating innovative, barrier-free playgrounds and splash parks that benefit the social, emotional, developmental, and physical well-being of all users.
Since 2002, Michelle's love of parks and outdoor play spaces has flourished as she continues to educate herself and her team on industry best practices and innovative products and designs.
We know you have questions, and we want to provide answers. Below you will find most of the typical questions we get asked regarding playground and recreation projects. Of course if you don’t see an answer to your question, feel free to reach out to your recreation consultant, or our friendly customer service staff.
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