The Importance of Simplicity in Care Home Design

• Purposeful Design: Care home design, including layout and furnishings, is meticulously planned to enhance residents’ health and happiness, with simplicity as a core principle.
• Minimized Confusion: Simple layout plans, familiar colour schemes, and uncluttered spaces help minimize confusion among residents, striking a balance between avoiding overwhelming environments and overly sparse ones.
• Enhanced Wellbeing: Easy access to essential rooms and outdoor spaces, coupled with straightforward pathways and designs, significantly impacts residents’ mental wellbeing, fostering a sense of comfort and security.

When you look around a care home, it might just seem like any other building at first glance, but this isn’t the case. Everything about a care home’s design, from the structure of the building to the finishing touches like furnishings, are all deliberate, and all contribute to the health and happiness of the residents.

Today, we’re going to be taking a look at why simplicity is so important in care home design and how it can improve residents’ wellbeing.

How to Minimising Confusion in Care Home Design

One of the most important aims of care home design is to minimise the confusion of residents, which can be achieved through using simple layout plans for rooms and the building itself, as well as the use of familiar colour schemes and objects.

One particular layout challenge that you might want to consider is trying to find the balance between rooms that are too busy and rooms that have wide open spaces. Naturally, a room with too much going on is going to cause confusion amongst residents, but equally rooms with large open spaces have also been known to spark feelings of discomfort and worry, so finding the middle ground is key.

Easy Access To Other Rooms and The Outdoors

Another important care home design goal is to ensure that residents have easy access to other rooms, such as toilets and their bedroom, as well as easy access to the outdoors when they need it. Just knowing that these things are simply a short walk away can have a huge impact on residents’ mental wellbeing, which is why it’s so important. 

With this in mind, when it comes to the layout of the building, try and keep corridors as straight and as easy to navigate as possible, as well as being well lit. This will ensure that going from A to B doesn’t seem like such a daunting task.

Comfortable Outdoor Experiences

When residents take a walk outdoors, the focus should be on enjoying nature and the experience itself, rather than trying to navigate the area. This is why it’s essential that a care home’s outdoor/garden area should be as simple as possible when it comes to design.

An example of this might be to implement pathways that lead back to the point where they started. This way, residents can simply take a walk and follow the path without having to worry about where it leads or getting lost.

Aedifice Partnership is a leading consultancy and project management firm specializing in delivering high-quality projects across various sectors, including care homes, residential properties, education establishments, and commercial properties.

Our range of services includes project management, chartered building surveys, CDM and quantity surveying among others.

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