In August, Dallas-based Everest Rehabilitation Hospitals revealed its plans to build a 36-bed inpatient physical rehab facility at The Villages, the massive active-adult and retirement community in Florida. That hospital will be Everest’s eighth under construction in the Sunshine State.
The 41,000-sf Villages project on 8.47 acres of land in Oxford, Fla., will cost $24 million to build. It is the latest in Everest’s construction of identical multi-specialty acute-care hospitals in several states. The hospitals serve patients recovering from stroke, brain injury, neurological conditions, trauma, spinal cord injury, speech impediments, amputation, pulmonary disease, orthopedic injury, COVID-19, and other medically complex conditions.
The hospitals are equipped with in- and outpatient physical therapy gyms, an outdoor mobility courtyard, aqua therapy, a furnished life skills training apartment with a full kitchen and bathroom, in-house dialysis, and a pharmacy. There are also gathering areas for families that include a large dining room.
DBA Architects, based in McKinney, Texas, whose design work is heavily in the residential sector, provided the prototype design for Everest that had to be universal enough so it could be replicated to accommodate Everest’s expansion strategy. The company opened its first hospital in Longview, Texas, in June 2019 and currently has six facilities operating in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Ohio. Everest has another 10 hospitals in various stages of design and construction, with its facility in El Paso, Texas, scheduled to open by the end of this year, and another in San Antonio opening in the first quarter of 2023.
Bryan Moore, DBA Architects’ CEO and President, tells BD+C that Everest’s plan has been to grow as rapidly as possible to meet increasing physical rehab needs. That growth is being propelled by entrepreneur Marc Sparks, Everest’s Co-founder and President of the private-equity firm Timber Creek Capital, which is Everest’s developer. (According to his online bio, Sparks has been involved in over 60 startups, “some outrageously successful, others downright disasters.”)
Sparks has stated that he wanted Everest’s ambiance to be more hotel-like and service oriented than institutional. “What Marc didn’t want was a hospital that looked like a place where people go to die,” says Moore. So Everest Rehab’s design and programming include art work, natural light, high ceilings, outdoor dining, room service, and social events.
A plan for expansion: Everest Rehabilitation Hospitals
Repetitive design is often frowned upon by architects, but it certainly has its place: ask any data center or multifamily housing developer. And Everest, says Moore, was attracted to this kind of design’s economies of scale, so that the hospitals could offer “the same menus, same therapies, and medications.” Moore describes this process as “cut and paste,” although he is quick to add that it DBA still had plenty of design leeway.
There’s no prefabrication in the construction of Everest’s hospitals, although Moore says that prefab is now being considered for the patients’ wing as Everest plots its expansion. (Everest’s buildings are expandable to 48 beds.)
Everest hasn’t stated yet how many hospitals it intends to build and operate beyond the 16 it already has opened or are under construction. Everest’s business model uses an actuarial program to determine need based on the number of rehab hospitals and beds within a 100-mile radius of a given market. Last year, the Florida market “opened up,” says Moore, when the DeSantis administration did away with a restriction that had required arduous proof of need before a new healthcare facility could be built.
Among the four contractors it has used to build its hospitals is H.J. High Construction, which Moore says has experience building hospitals in Florida.
Moore and Sparks met when they were working on a homeless shelter project for Samaritan Inn. When Sparks shared his vision for Everest’s rehabilitation hospitals, Moore was ready to jump in: DBA was already doing a lot of repetitive design for its multifamily clients. And back in the late 1980s, the firm was involved in the prototype design business for fast food franchises.
Related Stories
| Mar 14, 2011
Renowned sustainable architect Charles D. Knight to lead Cannon Design’s Phoenix office
Cannon Design is pleased to announce that Charles D. Knight, AIA, CID, LEED AP, has joined the firm as principal. Knight will serve as the leader of the Phoenix office with a focus on advancing the firm’s healthcare practice. Knight brings over 25 years of experience and is an internationally recognized architect who has won numerous awards for his unique contributions to the sustainable and humanistic design of healthcare facilities.
| Mar 11, 2011
Renovation energizes retirement community in Massachusetts
The 12-year-old Edgewood Retirement Community in Andover, Mass., underwent a major 40,000-sf expansion and renovation that added 60 patient care beds in the long-term care unit, a new 17,000-sf, 40-bed cognitive impairment unit, and an 80-seat informal dining bistro.
| Mar 11, 2011
Research facility added to Texas Medical Center
Situated on the Texas Medical Center’s North Campus in Houston, the new Methodist Hospital Research Institute is a 12-story, 440,000-sf facility dedicated to translational research. Designed by New York City-based Kohn Pedersen Fox, with healthcare, science, and technology firm WHR Architects, Houston, the building has open, flexible labs, offices, and amenities for use by 90 principal investigators and 800 post-doc trainees and staff.
| Mar 11, 2011
Mixed-income retirement community in Maryland based on holistic care
The Green House Residences at Stadium Place in Waverly, Md., is a five-story, 40,600-sf, mixed-income retirement community based on a holistic continuum of care concept developed by Dr. Bill Thomas. Each of the four residential floors houses a self-contained home for 12 residents that includes 12 bedrooms/baths organized around a common living/social area called the “hearth,” which includes a kitchen, living room with fireplace, and dining area.
| Mar 3, 2011
HDR acquires healthcare design-build firm Cooper Medical
HDR, a global architecture, engineering and consulting firm, acquired Cooper Medical, a firm providing integrated design and construction services for healthcare facilities throughout the U.S. The new alliance, HDR Cooper Medical, will provide a full service design and construction delivery model to healthcare clients.
| Mar 1, 2011
New survey shows shifts in hospital construction projects
America’s hospitals and health systems are focusing more on renovation or expansion than new construction, according to a new survey conducted by Health Facilities Management magazine and the American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE). In fact, renovation or expansion accounted for 73% of construction projects at hospitals responding to the survey.
| Feb 22, 2011
HDR Architecture names four healthcare directors
Four senior professionals in HDR Architecture’s healthcare program have been named Healthcare directors.
| Feb 17, 2011
HDR Architecture sponsors national effort to green operating rooms
HDR Architecture, Inc. has joined the group of corporate sponsors of Practice Greenhealth’s Greening the Operating Room Initiative. This sweeping and prescriptive path to green the nation’s operating rooms was launched earlier this year to reduce the environmental footprint of the operating suites in hospitals across the country, which can produce between 20 and 30% of a hospital’s total waste.
| Feb 11, 2011
Iowa surgery center addresses both inpatient and outpatient care
The 12,000-person community of Carroll, Iowa, has a new $28 million surgery center to provide both inpatient and outpatient care. Minneapolis-based healthcare design firm Horty Elving headed up the four-story, 120,000-sf project for St. Anthony’s Regional Hospital. The center’s layout is based on a circular process flow, and includes four 800-sf operating rooms with poured rubber floors to reduce leg fatigue for surgeons and support staff, two substerile rooms between each pair of operating rooms, and two endoscopy rooms adjacent to the outpatient prep and recovery rooms. Recovery rooms are clustered in groups of four. The large family lounge (left) has expansive windows with views of the countryside, and television monitors that display coded information on patient status so loved ones can follow a patient’s progress.
