Framebow - Designed and Made in England by Flyte so Fancy
Chicken keeping is a very popular hobby today, not only enjoyed by country folk with access to a field or smallholding, but also by people from all walks of life to give pleasure in the garden.
Whether you live in a town, village or the countryside if you are thinking about keeping a few garden hens, why not browse our website and consider buying one of our Framebow Chicken Coops. We can offer unique, wooden chicken coops, hand-made in the UK, that are built to last.
Urban chicken keeping is also growing and becoming quite a trendy hobby too. Gone are the days when allotment tending and chicken-keeping was a poor affair. Now you can keep chickens in your allotment or back garden, and anyone can enjoy this wonderful hobby.
Framebow Chicken Coops are very easy to clean, the internal parts just lift out and the larger Arch has a pull-out floor for effective cleaning. They are robust and built to last with secure walk-in runs, too.
Watch our video - Tour of the Arch Chicken Coop
Timber is such a lovely natural material, so much more natural and inviting an environment for your animals than plastic or metal. Here at Framebow we have developed a rather unique way of bending timber frames and have used these to create aesthetically pleasing yet practical animal and bird housing.
We build all our units with pressure treated Scandinavian Redwood, imported directly from Sweden. It is joinery grade, close-grain timber with our own profile design. We build to the highest quality and guarantee our housing against rot and fungal attack for 15 years.
We also offer a Fair Care Warranty so that, should there be any manufacturing defects within the first two years, we will repair, replace or refund as you wish. The size and quality of your coop is important to ensure your chickens are happy living in a warm, dry, well-ventilated house and of course, it's very important to have one that is very well made. If you would like advice on which house is best for you then please call us on 01300 345229.
The Design of your Framebow Chicken Coop
Ventilation in Chicken Housing:
We have incorporated ventilation features into the Framebow designs, allowing clean air to be drawn up from under the eaves or base and the stale air escapes either via the ventilation louvres or the meshed apex, enabling a flow of clean air and exit of ammonia.
Foul air can cause serious problems for your birds. Adequate ventilation in your chicken house is a very important requirement and one we have catered for very well in the design of our chicken housing.
Don't be tempted to add heat lamps to a hen house though, or artificial heat of any kind. Chickens cannot control their body heat as we do (and they are covered in a layer of feathers after all) so rapid changes in temperature are generally not good for them.
If you heat the house overnight and then they exit into a very frosty outdoors this can cause respiratory problems or even death through shock.
Nest Boxes & Perches:
Your Framebow Arch Coop comes complete with an internal nest box tray which is placed just inside the back door of the chicken house. This is a deep wooden tray with a plywood base and sloping plywood privacy walls (sloping to prevent perching). With the smaller Salisbury Chicken Coop, the tray has a single privacy wall and is placed to one side.
Add a nice deep layer of bedding e.g. HempBed-E Poultry Bedding, to the nest tray to ensure comfort for the hens and clean eggs for you. The nest box should always be lower than the perches, not only to prevent the birds from sleeping in the nest box at night but also to encourage them to lay their eggs in the cosiest, lowest part of the house. Egg collecting is easy by opening the back door to reveal the nest box tray just inside so you can collect all those delicious eggs.
Our chicken houses come complete with perches of course, and these are either free-standing (in the Salisbury Coop) or mounted on either side of the house (in the Arch House).
All are easily removable, a must for cleaning them off regularly. Allow at least 20 cm (8 in) of perch length per bird, and for larger fowl, allow up to 25 cm (10 in) perch space, and this is how we assess the capacity of our hen houses (along with floor space).
Our perches have rounded edges, made using 50mm x 38mm square timber, it's the ideal size so that the birds have a comfortable grip and can rest their breastbone on the perch.
The perches are at a higher level than the nesting box so that the birds will not sleep in the nest boxes at night and make them dirty. Always encourage your birds to roost on the perches to avoid leg problems, feather loss, mites & lice; you don’t want the birds lying in poo and dirt for hours. It does also make cleaning the house much easier for you if all the poo is under the perches.
Chicken House Pop-Hole and Automatic Door Openers:
The pop-hole is the small wooden door that allows the chickens to enter and exit the house into the run. We ensure that our pop-holes are large enough for most breeds of poultry at 29cm wide x 26cm high. The pop-holes have an internal vertical sliding door and can be opened and closed by the use of a drawstring cord. This enables you to open and close the door for your chickens without the need to enter the run area.
If you are new to keeping chickens, you've probably never come across the automatic pop-hole door openers before. They are very cleverly designed little battery-operated devices that can be fitted to your hen house, either internally or externally. They can be set to let your chickens out in the mornings at dawn, by raising the sliding pop-hole vertically, and then close the door at dusk by lowering the pop-hole automatically.
We are able to supply and fit automatic doors to our hen houses; either Chicken Guard or VSD units (both are available on this website). It is important when using the automatic door for the first time, to ensure it is set up and working properly and the birds do reliably roost at dusk on their own before relying on this gadget.
Overall, a great product, very robust and reliably built and especially useful for those winter months when you are returning home late from work and unable to shut away from your chickens within the safety of the chicken house before dark.
Your new chicken house will arrive complete with a long ramp from the pop-hole to the ground, it simply sits on the ledge of the pop-hole door and the birds will hop down in the morning (or fly) and then in the evening will gently make their way up it to bed.
Sliding Bedding Tray / Removable Floor:
Our large Arch Houses come with a slide-out dirt tray as the floor. It can be removed completely for a thorough clean, either by pressure washing or by hand with disinfectant or purpose-made cleaner (we do not recommend using standard household cleaners for animal housing - see our Health & Hygiene section for a full range of husbandry products).
As a tip, you could line the floor of the house with newspaper or an old feed bag, add some bedding, ideal for just quickly sliding out the hen house floor in the mornings and scooping out the paper, which can be easily disposed of either by putting on the compost heap or bonfire. Hemp Bedding is excellent for absorbing chicken mess and for lining the nesting boxes.
Which Chicken Coops are best?
The Chicken Coop designs available on the market today do vary but, our Framebow Chicken Coops are very different to other makes (of course, we would say that wouldn’t we !!). BUT, many of the wooden coops on the market today are of a simple box design, often made in China or India (with thin timber) and imported into the UK - and both our Framebow and Flyte so Fancy Chicken Coops are modern, extremely stylish and made in England.
The Framebow range is designed with a raised chicken house to keep the living quarters off the ground, reducing the presence of rodents and keeping the hens off the cold damp ground in winter. This also makes good use of the shelter under the house in their run area.
There's also nothing worse than having to contort your body to reach the corners, or paddling around in the mud, so our chicken coop styles have easy-clean features and require no bending to clean the chicken house.
Contemporary wooden chicken coops are our business, combining function and visual appeal to create wonderful products for you.
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Further Reading and Viewing ...
Chicken Keeping - A Beginners Guide
Tour the Flyte Aviary Chicken Coop
Using Hardwood Woodchip in a Chicken Run
Chicken Coops for the Garden ©Framebow (Flyte so Fancy Ltd) 2020. Author: Anne Weymouth (Director, Flyte so Fancy Ltd). Reproduction of part or all of this text is only possible with the express permission of Flyte so Fancy Ltd
