The Architecture of Healing

The places where we heal deserve the same design revolution the workplace already had, and we can afford it. More bluntly, once we understand why, can we afford not to?

There's a contrast I've been experiencing recently, on a daily basis. An image of a corridor, split down the middle. On one side: a beautiful office, warmth, timber, texture, style, and light falling graciously over everything.

On the other, the hospital as we know it, cold vinyl the colour of nothing in particular, sterile, the uniform handrail, the backrooms, and garish fluorescent light flattening everything it touches, including people.

Both halves of that corridor are functional. Both are cleanable, durable and compliant. Ironically, one was designed for a healthy human, the other to incubate an injured one.

I've spent the past decade and a bit of my working life thinking intimately about how environments make people feel, in workplaces, in hospitality, in the furniture that fills a room, the light that graces it, how we move through space and time, and why. The longer I sit with that contrasting image, the more a simple thought insists on itself:

Perhaps hospital design is due for a definitive rethink and shift in priorities, and for all the same reasons the office underwent such a fundamental change in its sensibilities.

Arguably the case is stronger in a medical environment, where wellbeing, recovery and a core sense of optimism and care should be a set of profound undeniable truthes.

The office just had its design reckoning

Considerably so over the past 5 years. Elevated interior design, curated joinery, bespoke furniture collections, wellness facilities, integrated technology, and hospitality led operations; they're now the industry norm far beyond just coworking 2.0.

The default office used to be a grid of desks under harsh light, optimised for a single metric: cost per square metre. Everything followed suit from that, thin partitions, dead acoustics, functionality first.

Then everything shifted...

I demonstrated an alternative, and collectively everyone acknowledged that generic environments were quietly draining the people inside them. The workday was worth designing with the same seriousness and compassion we bring to the places we live, love and enjoy sharing most. And serviced to the same degree we expect from hotels stays.

One of the governing design rules for ECLAT and FORME was material honesty. Nothing thin, nothing pretending to be something else; timber, travertine, stone, leather, wool, not a ceiling or carpet tile in sight, space and materiality both treated as the purest of luxuries. Every effort taken, each opportunity acted upon, beautiful design in every square metre. People felt the difference before they could name it, subconsciously even:

A depth of care that you could hear, feel, see and touch. That was the point of my design language, fundamental elevation and for all the right reasons.

Here's the uncomfortable question. If we now accept that an atypical office worker deserves beautiful light, honest materials, acoustic calm, hospitality and to exist within a psychologically healthy environment each and every workday; how have we concluded that a person recovering from surgery, or a nurse fourteen hours into a double shift, or a family fearfully waiting for news, deserves less?

Nobody decided this deliberately. It happened the way most institutional outcomes happen: one defensible decision at a time. Every individual choice, the cheaper and more durable flooring, the standard light fitting and ceiling treatment, corridors entirely utilitarian and functional without a moments pause. Of course it was all rational, a hospital has a purpose, but the sum; perhaps not entirely humane in its design language.

We have known for forty years:

This is not a sentimental matter, and nothing I say here is a unique vision not already had by someone else, and deployed incredibly well many times over, as per tye examples below.

My thought is that this might be the most evidence-backed claim in all of architecture and interior design:

Hospitals should be the most beautiful and compassionately considered environments we create as a society.

Florence Nightingale wrote about light, air and outlook in the 1860s. But the modern field dates to 1984, when Roger Ulrich published a study in Science with a finding so clean it still startles: surgical patients whose windows looked onto trees recovered faster, needed fewer strong painkillers, and drew fewer negative comments in nurses' notes than matched patients whose identical rooms faced a brick wall.

Same hospital, same surgery, same care. The only variable was what the building offered to the eye, the spirit and the soul.

Four decades of research have followed, and the findings all run in one direction. Daylight, views of nature, single rooms, acoustic control, considered design, soft touches, integrated care, and legible wayfinding are associated with shorter stays, less medication, fewer errors, fewer falls, lower staff turnover, and generally better institutional performance.

In healthcare, design is not decoration. It's a clinical instrument, as much a part of the treatment environment as the equipment we would never dream of value-engineering away.

And the benefits extend to staff as much as patients. A hospital is also a workplace, one of the hardest workplaces we ask anyone to endure. A building and a role that often grinds down the people workinh in it. That's not a neutral container for care. It's a tax on care.

The economics, honestly

Now the part that usually ends these kinds of conversations: money. Because it's very easy to write a warm essay about healing environments that win design awards, and much harder to reconcile it with the reality of how hospitals actually get built. So let's look at that reality.

Hospitals are brutally expensive. In Australia, healthcare construction runs among the highest per-square-metre costs of any building type, and the past few years of labour shortages and material inflation have made it worse.

Major public projects have seen budgets nearly double between announcement and delivery. Under that pressure, the instinct of every procurement process is to strip, not add: award it to the lowest bidder, cut the "soft" scope first, and treat anything aesthetic as the obvious sacrifice.

But this instinct rests on two errors.

The first is confusing capital cost with lifecycle cost. A hospital is built once and operated for fifty or more years, and the operating bill dwarfs the construction bill many times over. A finish that is cheap on day one and shabby by year five; replaced, patched, apologised for, is not economical. It is deferred expense wearing the costume of savings.

The lowest bid very often delivers the most expensive building and infrastructure in the long run.

The second error is assuming that the human qualities of a building sit on top of its budget, as a premium. Mostly, they don't. The researchers behind the "Fable Hospital" studies have been modelling this for twenty years: a hypothetical hospital built with the full suite of evidence-based design features, daylight, single rooms, acoustic treatment, high quality materials, human experience first architecture, access to nature.

The original 2004 model priced the premium at around five per cent of construction cost. The 2011 update put it at roughly seven per cent, paid back within three years through operational savings alone, fewer infections, fewer falls, shorter stays, lower staff turnover, before counting a single dollar of revenue benefit.

The newest version, published this year (2026) with Perkins&Will, models the premium at around three per cent, recouped in about two years, with net gains beyond a hundred million dollars over a decade for a single 300-bed hospital.

Read that again...

The considered hospital is not a luxury we fund instead of care. It is an investment that pays for care.

Beauty is a set of beliefs, not a list of line items

And here is the deeper truth, the one I believe most firmly after years of building spaces like ECLAT: things don't need to be expensive to be beautiful, and beautiful outcomes don't need to encroach upon practicality, durability or sensibility.

Light: Not just natural daylight, all lighting. Concerning orientation, glazing placed with intent, and interior architecture that works in harmony with the light that makes it impactful. The discipline not to bury sterile patient rooms behind service cores. And just as importantly, caring deeply for the rooms without sunlight.

Proportion: A corridor that lets two beds pass without a squeeze, a ceiling height that doesn't press down on a person lying on their back staring up at it, these are drawing-board decisions, made or unmade long before anyone opens a finishes catalogue.

Legibility: A building you can navigate intuitively, which draws you forward naturally, an invisible subconscious guide in the worst week of your life, without needing a laminated map. And a feeling of warmth as it draws you further into its embrace.

Where materials do carry cost, the old trade-off between beauty and performance has largely collapsed. There are now stunning flooring products that are warm underfoot, quiet, and hospital-cleanable. A huge array of timber systems rated for clinical environments.

Textiles that survive bleach and still feel like textiles years later. Durability and dignity are no longer competing specifications; the manufacturing and materials research industries quietly solved that problem while nobody was updating the procurement templates.

What remains is not a cost barrier. It is perhaps a habit, a defaulted assumption that a hospital is supposed to look like a hospital.

The proof exists and some of it is close to home. Maggie's Centres across the UK, small cancer-support buildings by some of the world's great architects, were founded on a dying woman's conviction that people in the worst moments of their lives deserve thoughtful light, a view of trees, and a kitchen table. They are not extravagant for the sake of itself. They are considered ones, and people walk into them feeling held, nurtured and cared for.

In regional Victoria, the Bendigo Hospital wove timber ceilings, courtyards and gardens through a major public facility, on a public budget, precisely because the evidence said it would serve patients and staff in ways that don't exist on a spreadsheet. It can be done. It has been done. The question is why these might remain the exceptions.

What's Really Changing?

It is fair, at this point, to ask for more than argument. So here is a brief proposal, not a fantasy hospital, but some specific moves a designer could make inside the budget, the compliance envelope and the cleaning regime that already exist.

Design the room from the pillow. Every drawing set shows the patient room as a plan, from above, a view no patient will ever have. The occupant's world is horizontal: the ceiling, the top third of the walls, whatever the window offers from bed height, the interior materiality, the joinery. So design for that perspective.

An acoustic ceiling with warmth and texture instead of a white grid. Indirect light washing surfaces, with nothing glaring down into the lying sightline. The window sill dropped low enough so the sky and the trees are visible from the mattress, not just from the visitor's chair. None of this costs more than doing it carelessly. It only requires someone to lay down inside the drawing.

Light for all twenty-four hours. A hospital is one of the few buildings we design that never truly sleeps, yet we light it as if it were a supermarket at noon. Anyone who has been awake in one of these buildings at three in the morning, or walks a service corridor or a room where sunlight can'treach; knows the truth of it: not all light was designed for a human.

Circadian lighting, warm and low at night, brightening with the day, simulated cloud behaviour and reactive ambience; now ordinary technology at ordinary cost.

It serves the night nurse's alertness and the patient's sleep at the same time. Where budgets are tightest, the intervention is even simpler: dimmers, warm lamps at the bedhead, and the discipline to switch the corridors down after ten, better yet; fully automated so the building naturally breathes with its patients, the weather and the seasons.

Make the corridors go somewhere. The most dispiriting thing about the standard hospital corridor is not its finishes but its endlessness. Terminate every corridor in daylight, a window, a courtyard, a garden, and the building begins to navigate itself; you walk toward the light, which is wayfinding older than signage. Break the run with alcoves, soft zones, a change in ceiling height. Put timber on the elements every hand will touch, quality fittings which speak in a residential tone, seek out opportunities for little design moments that communicate with the soul. These are documentation decisions, not budget decisions.

Design one room beautifully, then repeat it. This is where the economics and the craft shake hands. At FORME, we built ECLAT around a bespoke kit of parts, a small family of gorgeous elements designed once, with total care, then deployed everywhere so the whole environment reads as one considered idea.

A hospital is the perfect candidate for exactly this thinking, and the industry's shift toward modular and prefabricated construction makes it more true every year. Pour the design intensity into a single beautiful patient-room module; its ceiling, its light, its joinery, its fittings; and then amortise that intensity of that care across three hundred rooms.

Beauty at scale is economical. A new bespoke standard of high quality mediocrity, ward by ward.

Choose materials that tell the truth. Not ostentatiously, just mindfully. Sheet safety flooring in a warm, honest tone rather than speckled grey apology at the very least. Linoleum, which is natural, durable and antimicrobial, and has been quietly excellent for decades. Real texture at the few points a hand actually lands, rails, door pulls, bedside joinery. Hard-working surfaces don't have to be mundane or harsh. Material honesty is not a luxury position; it is a durability position.

Things that are what they appear to be, tend to wear with beautiful dignity instead of peeling.

Spend big on the staff room and offices. If a hospital could make only one discretionary move, I would make it this one: give the nurses and doctors and staff gorgeously designed rooms with windows. Staff turnover is one of the largest controllable costs in the entire system, and psyhical and psychological burnout is partly an environmental outcome. These unsung hero's deserve the best, consistently and without reservation.

The lobby's first impressions last ninety seconds. The staff room holds people who hold everything else together, twelve hours at a time, twenty four hours a day.

Nothing in that list is exotic. Most of it is cost-neutral at the point of documentation, and the rest pays for itself on the timescales the Fable work has already established. What it demands is not money. It is intent and compassion, applied early, from the right point of view, which is to say, from the pillow, from the corridor, from the small hours; saying we care about you, and the building does too.

There is no better demonstration of the above than the Gandel Wing at Cabrini Malvern in Victoria. Architects from Bates Smart, one of Victoria’s top architecture practices, approached every aspect of the design through the lens of the patient back in 2019. “We wanted to ensure new levels of dignity, comfort and safety,” says Mark Healey, Bates Smart’s studio director.

Public and private, and the same false economy

Australia runs two hospital systems, and each occasionally fails the tests of its fundamental economy in its own way.

Public hospitals are owned by governments and built through capital allocation processes that answer, in the end, to budget cycles and political timing. Capital and depreciation aren't even included in the way we price hospital activity, which means the building itself, the thing patients and staff inhabit every hour; sits structurally offstage in the economics of care.

When the money is announced, the pressure is to maximise beds per dollar and cut the "soft" scope; the fifty-year operating consequences land on a different budget, in a different electoral cycle, on someone else's watch.

The new Footscray hospital is a champion of this long term understanding of true value capture, and was at the core of my thinking when I developed the Creative Quarter urban planning and placemaking proposal (web microsite coming soon); which was the precursor to the Creative West development. One particular request during initial planning of the hospital came to epitomise their entire project:

“A gentleman in the community consultation said, ‘I’d like to imagine I could come to this hospital even if I weren’t sick.'” At its core, this ignited a community first approach.

Private hospitals face a different distortion. Much of the sector is backed by investors whose return horizons run three to seven years. A timescale fundamentally mismatched to infrastructure meant to serve for half a century. Under margin pressure, long-term investment in environment is exactly the spending that gets deferred.

The irony is that private hospitals compete on experience; the environment is a large part of what patients believe they are choosing. Skimping on it is not conservatism. It is brand erosion on a mortgage.

And as far as private hospitals are concerned, I believe something else is tragically overlooked. Branding should matter. Lifestyle oriented, substantial, meaningful, consistent, all encompassing; brand excellence. Not just a logo.

Different structures, different incentives. The same false economy. Both systems public and private may systematically undervalue the one asset that touches every patient, every visitor and every staff member on every single day of its long life: the passive care and therapy offered by the design of the building itself.

What logic, empathy and compassion would build

None of this argues for marble foyers or architecture as spectacle. Restraint is the discipline. A hospital must be cleanable, robust, efficient, functional and safe before it is anything else. The entire point is that it can be all of those things and still be humanely designed and not a detriment to the senses.

The evidence says it can be achieved efficiently. The materials exist. I'd say the social ambition does too. The economics, honestly counted across a building's life, are very much on the side of doing things differently.

What's missing is not money or knowledge. It's the decision to care at the level of the brief; to write light, dignity, love and calm into the requirements, curated lived design sitting right next to infection control and fire compliance, and to hold them with the same seriousness.

To measure cost across fifty years instead of one budget line. To notice that the people who use these buildings are, by definition, having some of the hardest days of their lives, physically, psychologically, spiritually; and to let that fact carry actual weight in a procurement meeting.

If anything, once logic, empathy and compassion are applied together, the conclusion is hard to escape:

I stand resolute in my belief. Hospitals should be the most beautiful & compassionately considered environments we create as a society.

Not beautiful instead of practical. Beautiful because of practicality, honestly reckoned with, and demanded, because a building that helps people recover faster, keeps its nurses longer, actively incubates well-being, and stands with dignity for fifty years is the most practical building we know how to make.

We rethought the office when we admitted how profoundly environments act on people. The hospital is where that truth matters most, and where we have perhaps honoured it the least. There are exceptional examples of this revolution underway, and they're exceptional demonstrations of changing priorities.

That corridor and contrast in the photograph sitting in my minds eye each day is split down the middle. So, for now, perhaps so are we.

This opinion wasn't written from the warm office on the left, it was written from a room connected to the hallway on the right.

Human Author: Jesse Hayes

Human Photographer: Jesse Hayes

AI Renderings: Nano Banana II x Seedream 2.5

Other Images: Vogue Australia, Western Health