People interact with buildings on a daily basis—in workplaces, neighborhoods and the places of business we frequent. In fact, we spend quite a lot of time inside them, and our behaviors are influenced by our surroundings.
Local players ranging from device maker Edwards Lifesciences Corp. and hospitals such as Children’s Hospital of Orange County and Kaiser Permanente, have invested significant upfront costs to redesign workspaces, and create an environment that emphasizes wellness—providing mental and physical breaks—encourages collaboration, drives innovation, and improves workflow efficiency.
Irvine-based Edwards’ multiphase headquarters makeover, excluding laboratory and manufacturing spaces regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, incorporates elements of creative-office design.
Hospitals, on the other hand, are designing facilities to keep up with changes that include technology, regulations and new medical practices and procedures. The Affordable Care Act, which drove them to bring nonurgent care into ambulatory care settings, means they’re designing for both critical care and nonurgent care settings. A key component is standardization.
Building in Wellness
Edwards Vice President of Global Real Estate and Procurement Tom Porter, who joined the company in 2011 to lead the headquarters upgrade and expansion, said the first thing he did was add a gym.
“There was a lab here; we repurposed the space for a gym,” he said, noting that the gym set a positive tone for change. “We now have about 1,200 users.”
Prior to joining Edwards, Porter held the same position at multinational engineering firm AECOM in Los Angeles.
Edwards makes products used to treat structural heart disease, specializing in artificial heart valves, and also has a critical care and surgical monitoring business (see related story, page 5). It expanded its campus from 500,000 square feet to 650,000 square feet to accommodate growth, increasing local employees by about 5% last year to more than 4,000. The largest public company in Orange County employs over 11,000 companywide and has an approximately $25 billion market cap, based on the Business Journal’s public companies ranking.
Porter pointed out other wellness-oriented initiatives, including a new cafe that serves farm-to-fork cooking, and his favorite—a Central Park walking track around a 3.8-acre greenspace that was previously a parking lot. “We want to bring possibilities [employees] haven’t considered before,” he said.
The company’s four-story parking structure sports one of the largest hydroponic “green” walls in the U.S., with over 20,000 plants spread across 4,000 square feet. The design, by architecture firm LPA Inc. in Irvine, incorporates sustainability through solar panels and a rainwater harvesting system.
Edwards plans to add an 800-car parking structure.
Standard Approach
Hospitals can optimize care with standardized design.
U.S. healthcare providers can save up to 20% on capital costs and raise service quality through standardized design across hospitals, according to a report by management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in New York. The report says that standardizing patient-room designs helped achieve cost savings in construction materials “by reducing the range of specifications and by sourcing directly from manufacturers to cut out distribution cost.”
Standardized spaces also improve patient care, eliminating the need for staff to get acquainted with multiple room configurations.
The 279-bed CHOC is an early adopter. Its $560 million expansion in 2013, which tripled the size of the hospital, was built “around the idea of designing safety,” said Medical Director of Quality and Safety Jim Cappon.
The seven-story tower houses all-private rooms, which Cappon said CHOC “took to the extreme form of standardization.” Every room is exactly the same, including which direction—the right-hand side—staff approach patients from.
Despite the fact that infrastructure cost is doubled compared to traditional construction due to the need for every room to have its own utility connections instead of rooms sharing connections, Cappon said the design is especially valuable in critical care units.
CHOC has applied the design to its new neonatal intensive care unit, which opens this week. The old unit “was built around the idea of pods, where you had multiple isolated … baby beds in a room,” Cappon said. “Private … rooms improves outcomes and family experience,” allowing parents to stay overnight with their newborns.
The unit—triple the size of the previous one, with 36 all-private rooms—also includes a family dining space, a room for siblings, and a lactation room.
Flexibility Popularized
Standardization offers flexibility.
“Before, we customized a space to a group,” Porter at Edwards said, adding that standardized office spaces allow the company to better accommodate growth. “A group that was 15 and now 50 can be moved around to another space because it’s all standardized.”
Architectural firm Ware Malcomb in Irvine said flexibility is central to its design of Newport Beach-based Real Estate Development Associates LLC’s 64,000-square-foot Newport Heights Medical Campus, where construction began in 2015.
“The ultimate goal was to create buildings that could adapt to any potential tenants in their infrastructure,” said Director of Healthcare Design Michael Peterson.
The pair of two-story medical office buildings will house private practices with a common area between. About 8,000 square feet remains available for additional tenants, including a wellness center, urgent care and imaging.
Peterson said the project will be ready for the first tenants to move in in January.
Real Estate Development partnered with private equity firm Bascom Group in Irvine and Lake Forest, Ill.-based investment firm Westminster Capital LLC to acquire the land.
Ware Malcomb has 453 employees, 143 of them local. Medical- and healthcare-related projects make up approximately 15% of its Irvine headquarters portfolio, which generated $70 million in revenue last year.
Outpatient Reimagined
Designing medical offices and outpatient centers shares many similarities with creative-office projects.
Kaiser has rolled out “next-generation medical offices” that represent a “real-world laboratory” and “an intentionally designed ambulatory experience,” according to Jodie Lesh, senior vice president of strategic planning and new ventures.
The Manhattan Beach facility opened last year, the first of 10 health hubs the Oakland-based nonprofit hospital and the nation’s largest HMO insurance provider plans throughout Southern California.
The centers are intended to change patient experience, from check-in to the way doctors and nurses interact with them. Technology plays heavily into the flexible design, including check-in kiosks, wait-time calculators, mobile doctor workstations and telemedicine capabilities.
Orange County is getting its own Kaiser health hub, a 28,294-square-foot facility in La Habra scheduled to open in August. The facility is set on five acres and provides services including primary care, diagnostic imaging, laboratory, pharmacy, radiology and behavioral health.
Interaction by Design
Edwards, likewise, uses design to promote opportunities for employee interaction.
“You create spaces that people can come and hang out,” Porter said, noting that the property is designed to feel like a college campus, with “casual nice furniture” in collaborative areas.
Joe Lozowski, president and chief executive of interior design firm Tangram Interiors LLC, which provided the furniture, said office layout and even furniture can reflect a company’s corporate culture and mission.
He pointed out that Edwards is different from a typical office project because of its clinical spaces.
“[We] really have to worry about infection control—the furniture has to be cleanable and be able to withstand bleach because they need to be wiped down,” he said.
Santa Fe Springs-based Tangram, whose chief executive is based in Newport Beach, has grown from a core business of distributing office furniture to manufacturers such as Steelcase, to encompassing five business units. It also provides services in flooring, custom furniture, moving and technology. Healthcare clients make up about 10% of its portfolio, including Edwards and Kaiser.
The company has 300 employees nationwide, 40 of them based in its Newport Beach office. It generated $188 million in revenue last year.
Porter said the biggest challenge in the company’s multiphase upgrade was making changes without interrupting workflow. The project, born out of the need to comply with seismic building codes, ended up providing “a more comfortable environment to attract and retain talent,” he said.
Edwards is nearing completion of its new atrium, which includes a lobby, a meeting area, lounge and coffee bar.
