GRAND JUNCTION — Christy Whitney straightens coffee tables, fluffs pillows and realigns antique pottery as she bustles through a cream and gold bungalow-style building tucked behind a historic Victorian.
With its gables, dormer windows, sloped pillars, prairie-art stained glass and burnished oak, this looks like it could be a 1920s mansion. But it’s not.
Instead, it is Colorado’s newest in-patient hospice center — a $9 million, 36,000-square-foot hospital facility. It’s been cleverly disguised as a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired dwelling where the dying can spend their last days with their families comfortably ensconced in a peaceful setting.
“We try to break down barriers to hospice — to help the community accept death as a part of life,” Whitney explained about the homey concept of this building, which began accepting patients in mid-October.
Whitney, the executive director of Hospice & Palliative Care of Western Colorado, has had a hand in every phase of the building and design. She’s a “junker” who loves collecting antique pottery, an aficionado of craft fairs, a skilled amateur designer and a registered nurse who has worked in hospice care for nearly 30 years.
She had a vision of what the new in-patient facility should look like, then hired The Blythe Group, a Grand Junction design and architectural firm, to carry it out.
The result is miles from the starchy, antiseptic feel of the standard health- care facility. The stained-glass front door opens into what looks like a well appointed living room. Built-in white oak pilasters and bookshelves show off pottery. The moss green tiled fireplace invites a rest in the facing plush couch or a turn on the nearby baby grand.
A chapel off to one side is the facility’s showpiece. Open beams and clerestory windows give the small room a soaring feeling. Stylized copper, red and gold leaves seem to float down the stained-glass windows. They also carry on a theme of leaves and vines, along with subtle touches of monarch butterflies, that runs through everything in the building, from carpet to wallcoverings to fabrics to doorknockers.
Designer Pamela Blythe said the challenge was making the decor beautiful while still meeting hospital code: Fabrics must be fire-retardant. Wood is limited to 10 percent of any wall. Floors in patient rooms must be vinyl.
The exterior was even more of a quandary. Whitney did not want the care center to look like a medical office. She also wanted it to fit in with the nearby Victorian structure, which serves as a hospice-run coffeehouse.
Blythe and her husband, architect Roy Blythe, made that happen by burrowing part of the facility into a hillside so it appears to be a single story from the front. They minimized its size with pillars, dormer windows, high and low gables and a multi-leveled roof line.
Whitney wanted every square foot to feel homey — even the patient rooms, which in many hospices are stark and hospital-like compared with the public areas.
So the patient rooms’ walls are painted a soothing color that brings to mind chai or honey, depending on which direction the light comes from.
And there is plenty of light. Each patient room has double glass doors that open onto patios so patients can be wheeled outside. Hallways have skylights and are broken up by sconce-lit “art niches” — small alcoves with chairs and paintings.
Each patient room is a little different. They all have wood-look floors with inlaid patterns. They have pale lemon-colored linens, puffy comforters and chocolate-colored throws. Each also has notable artwork from local artists or from antique print books that Whitney found on eBay.
Each room also has different fabrics in built-in headboards, furniture and pillows.
The furniture and decorating touches are carefully thought out in terms of family and patient comfort. Chairs and couches fold out into beds. Tables pull out so family members can do puzzles or play cards. There are shelves for flowers and side tables with reading lamps. An armoire hides a refrigerator, coffee pot and ironing board.
Art-deco style ceiling fans look beautiful, but also help with what caregivers call the dying’s “air hunger.”
Patients and their families have private bathrooms. But there is also a “spa” for patients with a hand-set Tuscan-style mosaic on one wall, and intricate leaf-patterned ceiling tiles to provide a bit of beauty for the person sitting in the whirlpool tub.
Many of these details came from hospice workers who six years ago began writing suggestions on a board at Whitney’s invitation. They also came from Whitney’s travels around the country to look at other hospices, and from a personal experience.
She spent a week in a hospital at her ill daughter’s bedside and quickly learned that hospitals are not designed to be welcoming to family members. There was no place for her to shower or to be out of glaring light during nurses’ middle-of-the-night visits. No place to put a Coke or a book until she balanced a cafeteria tray on top of a wastebasket. She decided that family should be at the forefront of design, rather than an afterthought.
That’s why there is a kitchen and dining room where families can sit down together and even make their own meals. A shelf-lined library provides a quiet place to plop in an overstuffed chair. A cozy restaurant on the bottom floor is open to the public as well as to patients’ families.
For Whitney, Blythe and the other hospice workers who had a hand in the building, designing for death was in no way macabre. It was focused on dignity, comfort and feeling at home.
“We want everything to feel like home,” Whitney said as she continued her rounds, poking a finger into a plant to check for dryness, moving a wastebasket to a better spot and smoothing coverlets on the beds.
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com
