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“So often good designs remain as paper architecture – just drawings and ideas, but we have the flexibility to build and test out these proposals. We’re looking to continually push what good design looks like.”
Darwin Group Principal Architect Louis Sullivan and his team have poured a lot into a very important project. The team first unveiled ‘Bedroom Evolved’ at last year’s Design in Mental Health Conference – a close collaboration with innovative healthcare architecture specialists, Medical Architecture, saw the creation of the concept.
Bedroom Evolved will return for this year’s conference – with some key differences.
As the name suggests, the pioneering modular mental health bedroom has evolved. And it has evolved because of the incredible feedback from last year’s visitors.
“The most amazing thing, which I don’t think any of us anticipated when we were creating it, was the impact of actually being able to stand in this space when it was exhibited,” says Louis.
“Over 400 people came to visit it last year, which is basically everybody who attended the show. And it’s quite large, so you could have a conversation with, say, 10 people inside this bedroom, which I don’t think we necessarily anticipated, but it became a home away from home for many people visiting the show.”
“It took people out of the hustle and bustle of the exhibition hall. They could step into this bedroom, close the windows and the door – and because we built it to our high Darwin Group standards, the walls are insulated and the room is effectively soundproof.”
“Once they got around the shock value of seeing this thing in the exhibition hall, they almost treated it like their home and they would sit down at the desk, on the bench or on the bed and you could have a conversation, and because of that we actually got some incredible feedback out of them, they become a lot more relaxed.”
“Quite often, visitors were designers of these rooms. As a designer, so often you don’t get to visit the buildings that you design for any meaningful amount of time, but they could actually suggest improvements and it was a really fruitful way of kind of capturing that feedback, with people passing by in an informal setting and just having their immediate, and then more developed, response to how this space makes them feel.”
Louis says the best feedback was where people highlighted things that didn’t work so well.
“These are the conversations I really enjoy,” he says. “We didn’t think people would be so detail-specific. But the fact that they dwelled in this space, they really had thoughtful opinions about it. For example, one of the nursing staff in attendance said when they open a door to check on a patient, often you have a contrasting colour across from the corridor to the bedroom, which creates a threshold of patient space and staff space. So it’s just about continuing that same threshold treatment around literally just a swing of the door.”
“We had really nice, thoughtful comments, which I don’t think we would have received any other way than literally building and exhibiting and getting people just to dwell in this space for that meaningful amount of time.”
“The good is always less interesting because you can’t really work on it, but there were many positive comments such as the robustness of the building and the build quality. A lot of people didn’t believe that it was a modular build that had been craned in the morning before the show. They thought we’d been building it on site for months. That’s validation that Darwin Group has a very appropriate solution to what is a major issue in terms of how you deal with mental health.”
Bedroom Evolved has been created in collaboration with Safehinge Primera and Tough Furniture. Improvements for 2024 include changes to the furniture, lighting, flooring and colour palette. The idea for the original project came from the recognition that the NHS not only needs a high-quality, cost-effective solution that can be deployed at speed whilst also providing a calming, serene place to improve people’s chances of responding successfully to treatment.
Exhibiting at the Design in Mental Health Conference brought not only considered feedback, but also a wide range of views.
“If we did this and parked it in a car park of a hospital you would get mid-level nursing staff come out and see it and the feedback would be brilliant, but it would just be very one-dimensional,” says Louis. “By being in an exhibition space we got heads of estate thinking about this pragmatically, estate maintenance thinking about how they would service it and how they could replace the walls, because as part of our standard Darwin Group modular building have non-load bearing walls so they can effectively be but taken out and replaced or changed into something completely different if the use case changes in 20-30 years’ time, and they think about all of those pragmatic things.”
“And then the most brilliant thing is that you also get end users who have experience of these facilities. Last year we had someone who used to occupy a room like this and as soon as he saw the front door he clocked where the camera was in the room and he was immediately saying: ‘I’m not sleeping in that bed. I’ll be tucked away in the corner where the camera can’t see me. Even if you tell me it’s off, I won’t believe you,’ and it’s comments like that that really made us delve into how we treat and think about the space.”
But it’s not just the inside where the team has turned its attention.
“My concept for the exterior was based on the ‘outdoor room’ which is a century-old idea, but a really powerful one that’s still relevant today. If you think just a couple of years to COVID, people began to think a lot more about the outdoor space. While the majority of what you would expect a company like us to do would be focused on the module itself, so much of what we actually think about is how we fit into the built environment.”
“With the bedroom, we incorporated fake grass, potted plants, comfortable chairs. It just makes you feel like home. It’s literally taking that concept from the inside outside and that was a big part of developing this concept. It’s comfortable, it’s familiar, it’s cosy.”
And from being something of a concept last year Bedroom Evolved has evolved into a working model.
“Last year, we had the bedroom at the exhibition and, although we could deliver it, it was very much seen as a concept. We’ve now progressed the project to the point where we’re having conversations with Trusts about how this could work for them in a ward setting and we hope to see it in a live, working environment in the near future.”
“We’re helping the market evolve quite dramatically by saying we can do these spaces. They fit ideally inside one of our modules, we can build it entirely offsite and it could be dropped in and deployed whenever it is needed.”
“Being able to go from a conceptual piece right through to delivery and seeing these as part of the healthcare estate is brilliant. And it’s not just applicable to mental health, but across the board. The size also lends itself to acute ward spaces and to Primary Care.”
Bedroom Evolved can be seen on Stand 214 at this year’s Design in Mental Health Conference.
To find out more about how Darwin Group can support your healthcare building needs by offering flexible, temporary or permanent building solutions, email enquiries@darwingroup.co.uk or complete the form below, and a member of the team will be in contact with further information.
