Design Champion: Matthew Smith, Associate, SmithGroup (San Francisco)
In just four years of doing senior living work, Matthew Smith has already left quite a mark on the industry. With a varied background in designing everything from airports and hospitals to jails and office buildings, he joined SmithGroup in 2015 and has come to embrace the unique nature of this sector. He credits his colleagues on the senior living team who have brought passion and expertise to every project, an attitude he found contagious. He enjoys listening to the needs of his clients but also to his teammates, who collectively use different perspectives and ideas to ultimately drive the best solution. Plus, his wife, Danica, is an occupational therapist who’s spent time working in skilled nursing, further supporting him in his senior living journey.
Smith is credited as being a technical architect who’s skilled at design while also respecting the environment at all its scales, resulting in a well-rounded approach to building. He’s applied that talent most recently to Masonic Homes of California, where he’s learned not just the nuances of this industry but how it can be transformed. His work there also has more far-reaching benefits, thanks to the time he spent educating local regulators for California’s famously rigorous Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) review. He helped them understand and achieve buy-in for a more residential design approach, paving the way for skilled nursing projects going forward. Here, he shares more about his work and outlook on senior living.
Environments for Aging: Tell us about the work you’ve done for Masonic Homes of California, particularly how it’s evolved your view of senior living.
Matthew Smith: Our firm has been very fortunate to work with Masonic Homes of California on a wide variety of projects, including a new two-story, 32-bed skilled nursing community with memory care services, a new 28-bed assisted living and memory care building, and two renovations of four-story buildings being converted from double rooms with mixed occupancy types to single rooms with one building devoted to assisted living and the other to memory care. Each of these projects has unique site conditions that strongly influenced our design response. So, while we try to develop some standard elements in the designs, like integrating open living and dining, how that’s done is unique to each one. The variety of these projects demonstrates that senior living can take many forms. Maybe I’m fortunate, because I come from working on a variety of different project types, that I don’t have many preconceived notions of what senior living is.
You have an incredible eye for the details that really matter. Why is it so important to truly listen to residents, understand who they are/what they need, and then apply that to the physical design?
Listening to not only the residents but also the staff is what gives every project the little details that differentiate a project’s success. Getting input from all the stakeholders on the project helps to stimulate new ideas and opportunities to make the design great. Often, we listen to what they say and use it as a jumping-off point to create something they may not have even imagined. In senior living projects, especially, the residents and staff have to feel that sense of ownership and pride of the building and spaces inside. They must embrace the design for the project to function successfully.
You’re also credited with creating an example of next-generation household design and an aesthetic rarely achieved in senior living. Tell us about the design.
The design for the new Skilled Nursing Facility at Masonic Homes of California – Covina Campus truly evolved in response to the context of the campus. The main administration and dining building on campus was designed by A. Quincy Jones and flanks a central courtyard. The architecture of this building uses a very distinctive exposed wood post and beam structure, large panes of glass, and concrete masonry units (CMU), for the exterior skin. The other senior living buildings on campus are also arranged to create landscaped courtyards and utilize the CMU and stucco on the exterior. These elements greatly informed the design for the new facility.
In plan, the new skilled nursing building is an L shape, which in combination with the existing senior residences creates a new campus courtyard, this one serving as the secure memory care garden for the residents of the new facility. We used the palette from the existing campus buildings as the foundation for the architecture of the exterior skin, with stucco as the canvas for the building; large glass windows to fill the public, living, and dining area with daylight; and CMU around stairs and service areas. The plan allowed us the opportunity to have short hallways with eight resident rooms off a central open living/dining area in between. Each element was placed in response to the context of the site and not by some template of what had been done before.
My family and I are fortunate to live in an Eichler home designed by A. Quincy Jones. Our home shares much of the same detailing with the administration building on campus, even down to the courtyard. Unfortunately, since the new skilled nursing facility is a two-story building in California, we were required to build it with steel instead of wood posts and beams. There are parallels between the plan for my home and the design of the new facility: For example, the open living/dining room with large windows and private resident rooms. Our hope is that this new facility becomes just as much a home for these residents as mine is for our family.
The work you’ve done will have far-reaching effects, too, thanks to the time you spent educating local regulators on skilled nursing. How did you manage to achieve understanding/buy-in when so many avoid SNF projects to not go through that process?
Masonic Homes of California provides services to Masons and their spouses. At the Covina Campus, residents who require skilled nursing care currently need to go to outside facilities for these services. Gary Charland, CEO and president of the Masonic Homes, and the Masonic Homes Board recognized the need to bring these residents back onto the campus. They had the vision, fortitude, and commitment to see this project through. From there, we brought California’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) staff on as another member of the team to work with us to see the project through. We had regular communication with them to understand what they needed to approve the project through permitting. We continue to communicate with their field staff to provide them the necessary technical information to get the project constructed. We spent time walking them through the project to understand the vision. We also spent a lot of time documenting how we complied with the various requirements of the code (the project was subject to the 2013 Title 24 California Code of Regulations) so they had everything they needed for approval. The process with OSHPD isn’t quick and it isn’t cheap. And everyone from the owner, design team, and contractor needs to have all their details in order.
What do you hope your efforts, from the small details on up to helping a regulatory body like OSHPD understand skilled nursing, will communicate to others working in senior living design?
That the commitment is worth it. To do something extraordinary doesn’t happen overnight and (unfortunately) costs a lot. We know these projects are going to touch the lives of so many for decades to come, so doing them with the care they deserve is important.
What lessons from working in other sectors have you applied to your work in senior living, and how do you see this industry evolving in the future?
Line-of-sight for staff is a primary design requirement in justice projects. Similarly, at the Covina project, we were able to provide line-of-sight from the nurses’ station down the resident hallways and over the open living/dining space. It was a simple move, but it’s so critical to resident safety. On aviation projects, the flow of passengers, staff, materials, bags, etc., through a facility drives the design. On the Covina project, we were able to separate the flow of materials in and out of the facility from the resident hallways.
In terms of the future, we are exploring opportunities for prefabrication and panelizing to reduce costs and speed up delivery for senior living projects. With the limited construction labor pool and expense of qualified labor in the Bay Area, the opportunities for cost savings and increased quality from these alternative construction methods are appealing. There are several challenges, especially with providing fully accessible spaces and open living/dining spaces, that currently are quite limited with prefabrication, mostly by transit size limits. As such, we’ve been exploring opportunities for off-site panelized systems, which appear to provide cost and time savings while allowing the greatest design flexibility, and fabricating walls, floors, and roofs off-site and having them delivered to the site and erected. The next step with the panel systems is integrating systems, like plumbing and electrical, into the walls or floors in the factory.
To read Q+As with all of the 2019 Design Champions, visit efamagazine.com/trends/reaching-for-the-stars-efas-2019-design-champions/.
