When the developers of The Springs at Hacienda at the River decided that their new skilled nursing project shouldn’t feel institutional, they took a major leap: They picked a design firm that had never built a SNF before.
Now, several years later, the team at Watermark Retirement Communities is celebrating a 2017 Senior Housing News Architecture and Design Award in the Skilled Nursing and Post-Acute Care category.
“We think the healing begins when you get to the front door, because you aren’t walking into a place that automatically you just don’t want to be in,” Watermark chairman David Freshwater told Senior Housing News, a sister site to Skilled Nursing News. “Because who wants to be in a nursing home?”
CallisonRTKL, a firm better known for resorts and higher-end housing properties, designed the Tucson, Ariz. SNF with a variety of hospitality-focused touches, including impressive views of the surrounding mountains and rivers, adobe exteriors, and Spanish Colonial elements. Watermark also retained a group of horses for the facility’s memory-care and assisted living residents, harkening back to the campus’s past as a dude ranch.
“We know the property — my wife actually trained horses on the property when she was in college — so we had a long history of hanging out at this property, if you will, and when it came on the market, it was fortuitous,” Freshwater said.
Read the full story by SNN’s own Maggie Flynn at Senior Housing News.
Written by Alex Spanko
Companies featured in this article:
The Springs at Hacienda at the River, Watermark Retirement Communities
