Mornington Centre / Lyons

Architects: Lyons
Location: Mornington, Victoria, Australia
Project Manager: Atkinsons
Structural & Civil Engineering: Earth Tech
Electrical & Mechanical Consultant: Umow Lai & Associates
Landscape Architect: Rush Wright Associates
Project Area: 4,500 sqm
Project Year: 2007
Photographs: John Gollings & Roger Du Buisson

This new building provides extended residential accommodation for older people who require specialist evaluation, rehabilitation and nursing care.

The building contests the conventional paradigm of a nursing home. Through its spatial arrangements and normalising environment it shifts from a medico-centric care model to one where family and carers work with staff to deliver care to residents.

The building is designed like a big house or coastal hotel – not like a hospital – with a new language developed to describe its program.

The rooms in which people stay contain bay windows in which people can sit and enjoy the view. These have large openable windows for admitting daylight and fresh air.

Clinical and medical support spaces are hidden to highlight the spaces for clients and their families which form their experience of the building. Timber linings, directional timber vinyl flooring, warm colours and domestic lighting reinforce these readings.

The dining room is the social heart and family focus for the building. Here family members, guests and staff come together to eat, chat and have a cup of tea.

The building is clad in oversized ‘planks’ which are made with bricks embossed with a contoured timber grain digital design.

The building supports a new way of delivering services to older people in our communities – through buildings which have people and families at the centre and drawing evidence based research into these clients’ special needs.