Here's a peek at the early design of a new health center in El Paso, Texas. The ground up project will accommodate a single-practitioner family practice clinic + a separate area for executive office space & conference room. The building has been sited in such a way to allow for the future expansion of the health center.  

You can see we are really leaning into the idea of playing with light & shadow as well as introducing vibrant colors. What do you think?

Our little medical office building broke ground in April.  The underground utility & foundation prep work has been a challenge due to soils & your typical gotcha-discoveries.  In June we finally poured the slab and now we are wrapping up the steel work!  We are marching forward & hoping to complete construction by the end of the year!

One of the best part of Oak Cliff where I live and office is that there are small pockets of urban developments tucked into neighborhoods. These old commercial buildings once housed mom and pop businesses that I imagine were vital to the neighborhood. Unfortunately, many stand empty today.

This small little postage stamp of a building in my own neighborhood is one of them.  It's perfect for my own offices + another tenant. We took a tour of it the other day and interior renovations would be fairly minor--just a bit of demo and clean up. What do you think?

Construction completed this spring on our South Dallas project, Cliffview Crossing.  This 1980's shopping center located at S. Polk Street & W. Ledbetter in Dallas, Texas has long been a stretch of sleepy buildings hugging an over-sized parking lot.  Since the time of its opening, the heart of the center was left empty due to a grocery store anchor-tenant that never materialized. Though many would argue (including myself) a grocery store would have been the best fit for this location in South Dallas' food desert, that wasn't to be.  

The two new buildings infill the space left bare the last four decades.  The larger of the two has been custom built for Fresenius Kidney Care which moved to this new location from just around the corner of the same shopping center.  Right next door is 6,200 square feet of retail/office shell space ready to be demised into up to four tenant spaces. 

The rest of the 60,000 square foot shopping center received much needed attention as well. The green fabric awnings were replaced with new metal awnings while both decorative & security lighting was added to the building. All tenants received new signage & the center's monuments signs were redesigned. Finally, the parking lot & surrounding grounds got some much needed landscaping.

We work with developers and property managers which are often looking for ways to improve their properties in order to gain interest & relevancy in the rental market. Sometimes that means taking a look at the curb appeal.  Here are some before & proposed photos for a building in Duncanville, Texas. We are proposing new storefronts which provide needed daylight in the spaces + giving the shops more visibility from the street. There is also a new tower element we hope will assign the building an identity as well as organize the facade in a more symmetrical manner. 

This is a peak at a new project which will soon be kicking into high gear. This is a ground-up small medical office building in North Texas.  I can't wait to share more as the project progresses.  Design should be complete by the holidays with construction to be completed around this time next year.​

I'm excited to show off another project nearing completion.  Located in Midlothian, Texas' growing Midtowne development, these two new buildings offer in-town living amongst a thriving commercial center.  The project entails over 1,800 square feet of office/retail space along George Hopper Road plus over 5,500 square foot studio and single bedroom apartments.

This week I got to tour the completed work of one of six medical clinics we designed this past year.  Yes, SIX. It's been a busy year!  This is certainly one of my favorites and it made me think about the unique issues we deal with when designing for the healthcare space.

The typical medical office space we design is around 3,000 square feet & neatly sits within a typical neighborhood retail center. Ideally the space allows for what we call a 'racetrack' design. This allows us to arrange exam rooms & their support spaces around a circular corridor, typically with a health practitioner's office at the center. This promotes visual control and one-way circulation when needed (like this past year when dealing with Covid).

While every healthcare provider is different, we find a general rule of thumb is to have three exam rooms + one consult room per practitioner.  In addition to these spaces, you have the lab, med storage, offices and staff areas to accommodate.  Finally, the practice specialty will dictate the size and number of other spaces. For instance, physical/occupational therapy clinics will require larger shared spaces to house therapy equipment.  For our asthma/allergy center we designed this year, space for pulmonary testing took precedence.  

The south Dallas shopping center at Polk and Ledbetter continues to progress towards the finish line despite the rain. I was on site this morning as the crew tries to finish up the stucco before the next round of storms roll through.  

While there is still a ways to go before we get to see all the landscaping and finished building envelope, one exciting thing happening this week is the addition of parking lot trees.  This huge shopping center was originally built in the 1980s with a vast concrete parking lot which I doubt was ever full. No thought was paid to softening this giant heat island with trees. The lot is regularly used as a cut-through to get from Polk to Ledbetter & then at night as a arena for joy-riding and cutting donuts. 

As part of our infill project, we have broken up the vast concrete with landscaped islands.  The trees arrived this week & already the difference can be felt on this hot & humid morning!