Senior Friendly Award: Swedish Edmonds Ambulatory Care Center

Designers of the Swedish Edmonds (Wash.) Ambulatory Care Center harkened back to the history of its city, as well as looked forward to the newest elements of architecture and modern design to create a place so inviting it won this year's award for the most senior-friendly facility.

It helped that the project's senior associate, Brian Uyesugi, has lived there for a decade and absorbed the culture of Edmonds, which is just a ferry ride up Puget Sound from Seattle where he works for architecture firm NBBJ.

“The Edmonds community was founded through the logging industry,” Uyesugi said. “It was an old shingle mill town. As it grew, it became a family town with multiple generations.”

At the clinic, “Some of the landscape features you see are sort of reminiscent of that shingle mill culture,” Uyesugi said. “We used existing trees that were moved as pieces of art in the landscape. We milled down these existing trees into slabs of cedar that are stacked in the landscape.”

Boom logs and historic photos of the region are prominently displayed in the lobby as part of the local décor.

The entrance and public concourse also accommodate an emergency department, with its Level IV trauma center, as well as centers for diagnostic imaging, urgent care and 29 exam rooms, all serving as the new front end of the existing 217-bed acute-care hospital.

With an easy walk from the parking area and its drive-up and drop-off configuration, “this new addition created a new front door” for the hospital, said interior designer Heather Nye. The furnishings create “a small safe haven, a destination for people to meet—a place where people can get a flu shot and an espresso,” Nye said.

Creature comforts and continuity with the community's past were a winning combination, said judge Skip Smith, system vice president of physical asset services at Catholic Health Initiatives.

“They did a really good job of utilizing the resources, including the pictures from the historical museum as a point of reference,” Smith said. “If I were a senior, it's going to take me back to my personal history, to see the logs and think back when that was a big part of the community. It really did give you a sense of continuity. As a senior citizen, if I walked into that facility, I would feel somewhat at home.”