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Design for Health and Disability

Design for hospitals, health and fitness and for the disabled are specialised fields, although they have something in common, in all requiring provisions to meet special human needs.

Some schemes are designed specifically for a particular purpose. In others the provision has to be incorporated unobtrusively as part of the normal accommodation.

Architects with experience in these fields will be familiar with the special layouts, dimensions and facilities required. They will know the importance of details such as work-top heights, window fastenings and so on, and how even the placing of a door can ensure the maximum usable floor area and minimum extra cost.

With careful design, bedrooms, toilets or even whole apartments or public areas, laid out specially to give easy wheelchair access and circulation, need not reveal their hidden qualities to those who do not need them. In new buildings, lifts, stair-chairs and ramps etc can be allowed for if envisaged early on. To insert them later can be very expensive.

An Architects ingenuity and problem-solving training can prove to be the best way of tackling these problems, and also of conforming to recent - and future - legislation without the high additional costs and appearance of afterthought so often associated with the subject.

We can help you with

The necessary research on any particular requirement or disability if it is outside the scope of our own general experience.

Design and advice on alternative ways of meeting requirements, how to integrate them with the rest of the building work, and on the costs involved.

Preparing drawings, obtaining quotations and seeing the work executed, and checking through the final accounts.

Our experience includes

Special schools' for children; a Special Care Unit for the doubly disabled for Shropshire County Council; hotel bedroom and public areas accommodation so that other residents using the rooms would not be aware of the special disabled provisions, thus making them generally usable by everyone.

Our design for Mobility Bungalows (where the disabled member can be kept within the family) was selected in a Local Authority competition.

Our experience has included hospital design and staff accommodation. We have designed extensions for Residential Care Homes and prepared a Feasibility Study for a training centre based on complementary medicine. Also designed private houses for invalid use, and incorporated facilities for the physically handicapped in hotels and various schemes including Visitor Centres and landscape walks for Severn Trent.