Human by Design
Creative solutions built around the needs of people. We design for people. We design to enhance the human experience and leave a lasting and positive impact on people’s lives and the world we inhabit. It starts and ends with the human being; if everything is design, everything we do is Human by Design.
Perkins Eastman is a leading architecture, urban design, and interior design firm offering programming, planning, design, and strategic planning services. With a network of more than 1,100 professionals across 24 interdisciplinary offices, we collaborate across borders and disciplines to connect people and ideas. Through each of our 18 core practice areas, we design for a sustainable and resilient future, and to enhance the human experience through the built environment.
While our practice is global; our work is local. And so our size and diversity is our strength — we collaborate seamlessly across borders, barriers, and disciplines to connect people and ideas. By listening well and building consensus, we deliver design solutions that exceed expectations.
The best and boldest work comes through true partnership with our clients as we collaborate to achieve their goals. Sometimes that means challenging ourselves, sometimes it requires challenging them. It always means building trusted relationships that stand the
test of time. We design for a sustainable and resilient future. The bond between humans and nature is unbreakable, and we have an inherent responsibility to enhance the health and wellbeing of our people, our communities, and our planet. Embracing the patterns of nature, we strive to uncover the possibilities of design.
Taking our work from concept to reality lies at the heart of our practice — there’s no greater reward than implementing a big idea. We deliver design solutions, always of the highest quality, with care and craft; we strive to deliver sustainability and imaginatively. But we deliver — no matter what it takes.
Maplewood at Princeton
ARTS + CULTURE
HIGHER EDUCATION
COMMERCIAL + OFFICE
HOSPITALITY
RETAIL + ENTERTAINMENT TRANSPORTATION +
K-12 EDUCATION
SCIENCE + TECHNOLOGY
HEALTHCARE
LARGE SCALE MIXED-USE
SENIOR LIVING
Senior Living Interior Design
Our senior living interior design practice is an extension of the overall design process. Our interior designers are involved from the beginning, working as one team alongside the architects, planners, and landscape architects.
Our interior designers address indoor-outdoor connections, appropriate scale, furnishability, materiality, circulation, day lighting, sustainability, sensory stimulation, wellness, accessibility and aging-in-place, cognitive awareness, form and function. We incorporate these elements to benefit residents, influencers, visitors and staff that live and work in the environments we create to establish a cohesive design approach. Over 90% of Perkins Eastman’s projects include interior design services; however, Perkins Eastman interior designers often work with other architectural firms to assist in creating an interior design that meets today’s and tomorrow’s consumer expectations.
Our services include: interior master planning, interior design, product design consulting, furniture selection, window treatment selection, art and accessory selection, interior landscape, signage, way finding design and installation coordination. Important items to consider include the following:
Our Unique Approach
Convergence
Our senior living design teams collaborate with the other practice areas in our firm, including hospitality, healthcare, residential, mixed-use, and education. This convergence of practice areas allows us to challenge the limits of what is traditionally considered senior living, while testing innovation against our depth of experience designing for older adults.
Collaboration
Our process is structured around collaborating with our clients and collaborating with other professionals on the project, including contractors, engineers, project managers, financial advisors, and development managers. Our design teams challenge each other and our clients to achieve success. The success of our projects is rooted in defining a sense of place that reflects the lifestyle of your consumer. Each project is unique and focuses on the development of your brand and your market while meeting your financial budget and embracing senior living design standards. We achieve success on projects both large and small by incorporating an interactive transparent process that keeps our clients involved and aware of actual and lifecycle costs for each product specified.
Considerations
Sensory Stimulation
It is through our senses and the ability to arouse our senses that we experience life. Our seven senses include: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, balance, and motion. These senses provide information about the world around us and contribute to our emotional, spiritual, and physical wellbeing. Our team understands how the aging process impacts our senses. It is through this understanding that we design spaces that address those changes and increase the ability for aging adults to remain independent, age in-place and most importantly — experience life.
Lighting
Lighting is key to help seniors who have diminishing visual acuity experience life. We look at many factors when addressing lighting within the senior living spaces we design:
• Varied light sources to create interest
• Increased levels of illumination 15–20 fc higher than typical
• Constant levels from area to area
• Glare-free sources
• Integration of natural daylight and the warmth of the sun
• Appropriate spectrum and diurnal light temperature changes to enhance production of melatonin
Attention to Acoustics
Particularly in large spaces and dining areas, acoustics are a crucial consideration for interior design. Older adults have greater difficulty with normal conversation in larger, open vicinities. The design should encourage socialization by making
everyday conversation easier for seniors. We do this on the large scale by selecting noise absorbing materials and locating them in areas of a room that minimize reverberation. We also pay attention to background noises that affect the ability of hearing aids to distinguish voices. We carefully recommend the location of noisy equipment such as the juice machines and refrigerated display cases in areas that contain and absorb the sound of their compressors. We may also place functions that compete with noise apart so that each space is distinct.
Color and the Older Adult
Color creates interest, provides contrast, defines volumes, elevates moods, invigorates the senses, inspires the mind, improves skin tones, enhances food, and even stimulates appetite. As we age, the eye’s cornea begins to yellow and impacts perception of color. The yellowing of the cornea makes it difficult to distinguish between blue and green, purple and brown, white and beige, and gray tones. Understanding the aging eye and the use of
Canvas Valley Forge
colors impact patterning and material selections is crucial to design for older adults. We are well versed in how color and contrast can impact pattern and the selection of appropriate fabrics, wall coverings, carpets, tile patterns, and other materials within the built environment. In the selection process, our team is sensitive to pattern movement due to complementary colors and their impact on balance and motion, colors that are perceived differently due to the aging eye and as a result look the same, and colors that can cause agitation in special-care environments.
Movement
Various types of movement become more difficult as we age and the environment can make life easier. Carpets can be direct laid to be easier for walkers to roll on. Bookshelves and mailboxes can be placed so that objects are not too high to reach or too low, to minimize bending. Gaps and thresholds can be minimized so seniors do not have to step over something. Door closers can be set, or door assists installed so that it is easier to open doors.
Furniture and Furnishings
residents and their guests to comfortably navigate. A way finding system should go beyond simple signage to become a multilayered system of spatial cues that include: signage, materiality, landmarks, accessories, spatial relationships, programs, connections to the outdoors and people.
Biophilia and Holistic Wellness
Our team recognizes the importance of environmental wellness, sustainability and the connection to nature and the outdoors. Harvard Biologist, Edward O. Wilson introduced the concept of Biophilia as “the inherent need of humans to
The selection of the furniture and furnishings are the final touches in the interior design of a project. Without the thoughtful selection of these items, the spaces will look incomplete. When selecting furniture for senior living environments, the potential physical frailty of the users must be kept in mind. We keep in mind that most residents will age in place. As a result, our team carefully reviews dimensional specifications, comfort, functionality, and durability in addition to budget.
Wayfinding
Wayfinding becomes an important component when designing for senior living communities, assisting
interact and affiliate with nature to achieve and maintain optimum health and well-being.” The design attributes of Biophilia include: dynamic use of daylight, natural ventilation, access to water, sensory connections to nature, complexity and order in design, mystery and exploration, prospect and refuge, natural forms and the use of local materials. Research has proven the wellness benefits of these attributes relative to productivity, emotional wellbeing, stress reduction, learning, healing and overall happiness.
Heritage Community of Kalamazoo
Basic Design Objectives
• A safe and comfortable environment that is supportive of the residents’ need to maintain independence and age-in-place.
• A design that seamlessly incorporates environmental supports in an unobtrusive manner.
• Spaces that encourage wellness and social connections.
• Design that addresses the six characteristics of aging that have the largest impact on older adults’ relationship to their environment: loss of balance, cognitive impairment, loss of strength, visual impairment, hearing impairment, and increased sensitivity to cold, drafts, glare and direct sunlight.
Aging is not ‘lost youth’ but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
BETTY FRIEDAN
