Healthcare Design Award for the Catkin Centre and Sunflower House
The Catkin Centre and Sunflower House at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital has been awarded Best Acute Care Design at the 2024 Healthcare Design Awards.
Designed for patients’ mental wellbeing, The Catkin Centre and Sunflower House pioneers a new approach to clinical buildings by connecting to the natural world.
The Alder Hey project brings together in two connected buildings a range of facilities that were previously scattered across the hospital site and the city of Liverpool. The Catkin Centre provides a new home for outpatient services, while Sunflower House provides a 12-bed inpatient mental health unit for children aged 5-13 with the most challenging mental health conditions.
The new buildings form part of a ‘Health Campus’ at Alder Hey, offering a joined-up approach to the treatment of physical and mental health for children and young adults. The buildings and the spaces between buildings have been designed to accentuate opportunities for planting, walks through landscape and views to create a holistic approach to “health in nature”.
Roddy Langmuir, Practice Leader, Cullinan Studio said on the project winning a Healthcare Design Award:
“It is great to be given this recognition for our work on specialist mental health facilities with the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. The young people treated in Catkin and Sunflower and the wonderful clinicians that treat them are in an environment they have helped tailor to their needs… filled with daylight and built robustly in timber, it confounds expectations of what such institutions must look and feel like.”
Generous, daylight-filled circulation routes and the use of natural materials in Sunflower House replace the long, narrow stress-inducing corridors of traditional hospitals.