Designer Forum - July 2010

By Kris Kirchner

When planning flooring for a new medical facility, interior designers must consider durability, cleanability, acoustics, aesthetics and cost in determining the final flooring selection.

But what happens when the program requirements for a new women’s center have several decidedly different and significantly diverse flooring requirements? That’s when the design team and flooring suppliers really need to buckle down and work together to get the job done right.

Atlanta’s Northside Hospital is one of the nation’s leading maternity and newborn care providers. Affectionately known as “The Baby Factory” due to its large volume, Northside offers comprehensive services for labor and delivery, neonatal care, high-risk perinatal diagnostics, parenting and newborn classes, and lactation consultation. As demand for its services expanded, Northside recognized the need to develop a new women’s center in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. A decision was made to construct a 108,000 square foot facility in Forsyth County, one of the fastest growing communities in the United States. The new facility is located about 25 miles north of the existing women’s center.

Any time an additional building is added to an existing hospital, a number of unique challenges arise that are not normally found on new construction sites. This project required the new women’s center to connect to the existing hospital building in four different areas. In addition, the new center also featured a bridge connecting it to an adjacent medical office building.

The floor plan for Northside Hospital-Forsyth’s new women’s center separates each of the four main departments into a pair of two-story wings connected by a central core. These department areas include the labor and delivery department, the post partum area, the neonatal intensive care unit, and the pre-op and post-op area. A rotunda creates a grand entrance leading to a public galleria that connects this facility to the existing hospital. This space, in essence, becomes the living room of the center, allowing families to gather for the joy of birth.

Early in the design process, it became clear that the challenge was to both meet the diverse needs of the four separate departments, including flooring performance requirements and maintenance needs, and ensure that the facility would function as a single cohesive unit with a single design theme and overall aesthetic.

The design objective was to create a spa-like environment to evoke a comfortable and calming atmosphere for patients and family. Compared to other women’s centers in the Atlanta area, Northside Hospital takes a less traditional approach in its design with the idea of appealing to a younger, more upscale demographic. Thus, from the lobby entrance and throughout the space, every design element strikes a contemporary aesthetic tone. The design incorporates principles of the Arts and Crafts movement as a foundation. These principles include an honest use of materials, which means that the materials are not “disguised” but reflect their true nature; simplicity in the details; use of nature as a source of inspiration; and employing furnishings that promote comfort. However, the women’s center design goes more contemporary and organic with material and color selection.

Ultimately, a unique look was achieved through strong architectural elements expressed in wood, glass, lighting and the honest use of interior materials. The interior was contrasted with furniture selections featuring clean lines and mocha wood tones that complement other lighter wood finishes. The flooring, too, was designed to fit in with these themes. My firm, K2J, Inc., worked closely with Atlanta-based flooring subcontractor Carpet Concepts to find just the right flooring solutions.

In the main public spaces of the facility, including the primary entrance and galleria connecting the new women’s center to the hospital, a very durable yet aesthetically pleasing flooring material was critical. To best meet both of these requirements, the design team opted to use epoxy terrazzo. Terrazzo is able to withstand the constant abuse of 24-hour traffic while at the same time it creates an enduring design aesthetic in its use of raw, natural materials. Our experience with other Northside Hospital campuses also educated us that terrazzo was a flooring material that is easy for the hospital’s environmental services team to maintain.

One of the principle features of the flooring in these public areas was the re-introduction of a lotus flower theme, a theme used in Northside Hospital’s original women’s center at its Sandy Springs location. The lotus flower has long been the symbol of creation and rebirth, and the project architects, Atlanta-based Howell Rusk Dodson, felt it should play a vital role in the new women’s center’s main entrance flooring design. The terrazzo flooring design of lotus blossom petals encircling a wheel of life motif became the focus of the rotunda design strategy, with all patient care and visitor service elements radiating from this central design component.

The facility’s public seating areas had an entirely different set of user requirements. As with the rest of the women’s center, the design team wanted these waiting areas to be comfortable, home-like environments that reduce the stress of a family waiting for the birth of a new loved one. But unlike the more clinical areas, these seating areas permitted the designers to use carpeting. Mannington’s Arpeggio carpet tile was selected to provide the design aesthetic of an area rug at the family seating groupings of the galleria. The Shaw Contract Silk collection was selected because of its visual luster and the way it contrasts the facility’s wood ceiling elements. While it’s often considered a risk to install a solid carpet in heavily trafficked public areas, in this case, the intricate detail of the architecture dictated such an approach.

In the labor and delivery department, the patient usually enters the room in a high state of anxiety, so the design strategy was to create a safe, warm, welcoming and comforting environment. Yet the finishes also had to be fully functional and thoroughly cleanable. These somewhat contradictory design parameters required the use of a seamless, heat-welded sheet vinyl flooring. The design took on a unique twist with the use of a custom Toli visual, installed with two-part epoxy adhesive.

Often, a women’s first impression of her birthing room comes from the first place she is directed to go when entering the room—the bathroom. As a result, it was important that the bathroom evoke the type of pampering the patient might find at a high-end hotel. To accomplish this, the design team decided to use colorbody porcelain on the floors as well as all of the walls, with accents of glass in the tile design. A custom Jacuzzi tub was included in the design to allow for more patient comfort as well as the possibility of elective water births.

For the labor, delivery and recovery department corridors, we selected wood look sheet vinyl from Toli, primarily because of the department’s constant wheel traffic and the ease of maintenance. This solution also served to provide a design bridge between the corridor and patient room areas.

For continuity of design, the post partum rooms and the department’s corridors feature architectural elements similar to those used in the labor, delivery and recovery areas. However, the project program necessitated the use of carpet in the post partum corridor for acoustic control and patient comfort, the idea being that quieter flooring would help new mothers sleep at all hours regardless of third party activities. Still, to aid in the transfer of stretcher- and wheelchair-bound patients through these corridors, a Shaw low-level loop solution dyed carpet tile was selected with a varied pattern design to better disguise staining, allow for ease of carpet replacement and enable constant wheel traffic.

The post partum patient rooms themselves feature a no-wax Decoria wood vinyl plank that provides a comfortable, home-like environment with ease of maintenance and little environmental services downtime between patient discharges.

The need for Cesarean sections often creates a high level of patient anxiety, making the comfort of the patient room most critical to the patient’s first impression. To accomplish this, the design team reiterated the use of the Toli sheet flooring used in the labor, delivery and recovery rooms, and finished the room with soothing wall accents and comfortable furnishings.

Due to the nature of an operating room, it was vital that the flooring selection stand up to the use of harsh surgical chemicals like Betadyne and DuraPrep. Estrie Dura-Med vinyl-rubber resilient sheet was the best choice for this clinical environment. Two-part polyurethane adhesive was specified to perform against the procedure bed PSI load and to counter the need for a strong horizontal shear strength against procedure bed movement.

For the neonatal intensive care (NICU) rooms, the design team evolved their flooring selection to coincide with new directions in NICU design. The original NICU design at the Northside Hospital Sandy Springs campus was based on a pod concept. Vinyl-backed, solution-dyed carpet was selected to provide acoustical components, while allowing for ease of maintenance. A NICU expansion project several years later provided an infant cubicle floor plan, allowing for more family-baby privacy. In this scenario, an acoustical-backed resilient flooring was selected. For the new Northside Hospital-Forsyth NICU, research dictated private NICU rooms, and thus the need for acoustic control through the flooring selection was minimized. This allowed the design team to specify a lower cost but visually pleasing Toli sheet vinyl flooring.

Northside Hospital’s new Forsyth Women’s Center is just one facility, but the multiple programming requirements made finding a single cohesive design solution a challenge. In the end, the final results exceeded all expectations of the client, the patients and the community. Northside Hospital-Forsyth is already planning to expand the women’s center. The design of this expansion will be easier for the design team, as the flooring decisions for the facility have worked out so successfully that they will be repeated in the expansion project.

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