Matching renovation with corporate philosophies

Home & Hospice Care of Rhode Island, the third oldest hospice in the country, is looking at its LEED-certified renovations for a new Providence property as a way to align its corporate philosophy with its infrastructure.
“The environmental sustainability really ties into, very philosophically, the cycles of life, the cycles of nature, the elements of our world,” President and CEO Analee Wulfkuhle said. “And we felt very strongly that our physical plan, our building, should reflect that philosophy.”
Since purchasing its 1085 North Main St. building out of receivership in August 2006, the hospice has been working on a design for renovations.
“Although we certainly had done a fair amount of homework prior to the purchase, we really had not totally developed our vision of what we would be doing with the building,” she said.
Now, more than a year and a half later, and after mulling those design issues with a cultural anthropologist, Home & Hospice is preparing to break ground this month on the renovations.
It paid about $4 million for the property and then created focus groups with staffers and consultants, who “really tested our presumptions as to what our patients, families and staff would need in this building,” she said.
The result, Wulfkuhle told Providence Business News recently, will be a renovation that will attempt to earn the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED – Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – certification.
The 50,000-squre-foot building, built in the 1975, will be renovated at a total cost of about $11 million.
Now, the building is a “rectangular brick box” that’s in need of innovation, Wulfkuhle said. The biggest challenge for the company was a real estate issue: location. “Nationally, there are many wonderful hospice facilities, many of which have been built from the ground up in wonderful bucolic settings with brooks and trees and birds,” she said. “We have a building in the middle of the city.”
The renovation, designed by Providence’s Vision 3 Architects, will have three functions: an administrative headquarters, a 24-bed inpatient facility and an education and bereavement center. Home & Hospice cares for about 400 patients a day – many in-home – and employs about 280, along with another 250 full-time-equivalent employees and about 300 volunteers.
On North Main Street, it will seek to minimize storm-water runoff and the “heat island effect,” which Wulfkuhle said is a gauge of the amount of blacktop in comparison to natural surfaces.
Demolition materials will be recycled and some of the building materials will have been recycled. Insulation materials will be of a higher standard than required. The parking lot lights are designed to keep light pollution at a minimum and away from the surrounding properties. The bike racks installed outside will be complimented inside by showers for those who bike to work.
The certification – LEED projects earn sliver, gold or platinum certifications based on points awarded for each sustainable element – isn’t awarded until the project is completed, said James Hughes, project architect with Vision 3. Home & Hospice is seeking a silver certification.
“It’s tough to say [what level we’ll be awarded] because you can always go for these credits, but you’re not always guaranteed them,” Hughes said. “They might look at something differently than the way that you look at it and say, ‘No, you’re not really doing what you should be doing.’
Quantifying the amount of the total budget that can be directly attributed to the LEED certification is difficult, Wulfkuhle said, “but we’re anticipating that it could be $250,000 to $500,000 in additional expenses.”
A large portion of those dollars can be attributed to mechanical changes that fit into the certification, including low-energy plumbing, windows and heating, she said.
But sustainable practices might not be as easy to integrate into patient care, Wulfkuhle admitted. “On an inpatient standpoint, that’s quite a bit more difficult because there’s a natural tension that exists between the principals of recycling and infection control and cleanliness and state-of-the-art services in inpatient hospitals,” she said.
And Wulfkuhle is hoping her nonprofit won’t encounter any surprises with the renovation, which is expected to take about a year.
“It is an old building, so … I hope we don’t find anything when we open those walls up,” she said. •

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