A fresh look at interiors: experienced designers review the latest interior design trends

Nursing Homes, Oct, 2004

Good housekeeping can only go so far in preserving the ambience of a facility. Foot and cart traffic, spills, direct sunlight, and plain old time contribute to tired-looking interiors. It takes more than a pretty bedspread or crispy chintz drapes to improve the aesthetics of a facility. Although updating your building's look might not appear budget-worthy right now, it can be an investment that pays big dividends as a marketing tool and contributor to resident and employee satisfaction. Recently, Nursing Homes/Long Term Care Management invited three interior design experts to share their perspectives on the latest materials, styles, and elder-focused trends.

Maria Nevelson, Nevelson, LLC: Many healthcare facilities have not addressed their interior finishes and furniture for some time. Because of their inevitable sticker shock, I like to work with the basics and select products that look fabulous while addressing facilities' durability and maintenance concerns.

To avoid the "cutesy-pie" homespun styling often applied to soften the harshness of the institutional setting, I look to hospitality products for a variety of styles. I agree with Cynthia Leibrock ("Let's Stop Tweaking a Flawed Model," Nursing Homes/Long Term Care Management, June 2004, p. 38) that it is imperative to maintain a professional atmosphere within the nursing home or assisted living facility. When you look at the architecture of many long-term care facilities today, the common-area spaces tend to be much larger than anyone's home spaces, making homey decorations look ridiculous. So, in selecting finishes and furniture, I continue to look at the tried-and-true products that have proven themselves over time, and believe their passage through my creative mind produces an updated spin.

Style-wise in general, we have moved from the 1960s to the 1970s, which is progress in the sense that it allows for more variety and motifinfluences from around the globe. Today's updated colors are cantaloupe orange, clear aqua, rich tasty browns, sage green, and turmeric red. Other updated aspects of long-term care design include:

Finishes. In particular, Crypton[R] fabrics (as used by Robert Allen Design) have blessed us with more and more colors and patterns to choose from.

Furnishings. The Arts and Crafts style, exemplified by American of Martinsville's Homestead, works well in long-term care settings. When I designed an assisted living facility in this style in 2000, there was nothing available for the healthcare market. Now there is.

Floorcoverings. Hospitality carpets, such as those produced by Milliken Carpets, are very popular. They come in a variety of beautifully developed patterns and can inspire an entire interior design scheme. They are effectively used in corridors with complementary patterns for adjoining rooms.

Wallcoverings. I still look to vinyl wallcovering (for example, Source One Exclusive from Eykon) and borders for a lot of "design information" (the confirmation of my interior design style and additional "artwork" when the budget doesn't allow for accessorizing). Goat-hair wall carpet (from Eurotex) for the dado--while heavy in the visual aesthetics--is excellent for sound absorption and provides a feeling of intimacy, while withstanding a lot of bumping and scraping. (And, yes, it is fire-rated for vertical applications.)

Lighting Fixtures. For corridors I am specifying Metalux's Aerial for the even, direct light it provides without creating glare. This is a surface-mounted fluorescent light fixture that is low-profile (an attribute that is very hard to find in lighting fixtures).

Special Items. (A) "Little chairs for little people." To encourage the grandchildren to visit, I placed a child's rocking chair in a facility sitting room, hoping that they would look forward to sitting in their own "special chair." (B) Real art. Coming from an artistic heritage, I always try to place real art in a facility. And, yes, it is often refused. A few years back, though, I was lucky with the lobby of an assisted living facility. I commissioned the ceramicist Paul Chaleff to make one of his soothing water fountains as a focal point.

For further information, phone (215) 790-9680 or e-mail maria@nevelson.com.

Elizabeth C. Brawley, IIDA, Design Concepts Unlimited, Inc.: Largely motivated by the growing emphasis on culture change, a greater emphasis on neighborhood or cluster design that is substantially less institutional and more residential is apparent. The long-sacred nurses' station is being replaced with decentralized workstations that are integrated into the environmental setting--a work space in the "family kitchen," for example, or a desk in the living area. These are more residential-looking and fit in the setting more comfortably and with less visual disruption than the large, often noisy "nurses' command center."

With the use of carpet designed for the tough use and special needs of assisted living and nursing homes, designers have begun to visually soften the environment, as well as quiet the noise. However, floorcovering is only part of the solution. Acoustic control is one area in which we need to do a better job.