Environments for Aging - Summer 2018 - 23

EFA DESIGN CHAMPION

MELISSA C. PRITCHARD
Senior vice president, SFCS Architects, Roanoke, Va.

hen Melissa C. Pritchard was young, her family was
always buying and renovating neglected houses.
She watched her parents and older brothers take
homes that were uninhabitable and create places where
people wanted to live. She also watched as her grandparents
struggled to remain in their home as they aged, challenged
by stairs, narrow doors, and clawfoot bathtubs. Later, when
she entered architecture school, these two experiences
fueled a passion in her to create better spaces, specifically
for seniors. After graduating, she returned to her hometown
of Memphis, Tenn., to help her parents care for her grandparents. By her mid-20s, she began a career at a general
design firm, pursuing small senior living projects, while simultaneously experiencing five family
members (including her grandparents) live and ultimately die in nursing homes-making her work
all the more meaningful. It was during this same time that Pritchard's firm was pursuing a renovation of an Alzheimer's day center. To prepare, she dove into heaps of research, scouring medical
journals to understand the disease while also realizing that little environmental evidence was
available. The firm won the job, and another passion was ignited. Today, Pritchard works at SFCS
Architects, where she continues to champion for better memory care environments and strive to
understand the resident experience on a very personal level. One of her most recent accomplishments is the completion of the Cottages at Cypress Cove in Fort Myers, Fla., an assisted living
memory care project that earned an Award of Merit in EFA's 2017 Design Showcase and was
selected as the site for SAGE's 2018 post-occupancy evaluation project.

EFA: What have you seen in existing memory care communities
that you've sought to improve?
Pritchard: While I think that environments overall have gradually been improving across the board
in the senior living industry, what really bothered me the most was that for those suffering from
dementia, the entire environmental approach seemed to be to contain, control, and manage those

seniors. The big focus was (and, in a lot of
instances, still is) on security and safety to
the degree that those factors often came well
ahead of quality of life and environment.
Another observation I've made while visiting
memory care environments is that they were
mainly locked areas that were sterile, clinical,
institutional, and devoid of comfort, color, freedom, nature, and familiarity. I started thinking
that in an effort not to "overstimulate" this
population, many of these environments had
become absolutely lacking humanity, verging
on being uninhabitable, and that this could
actually be making residents' lives worse
rather than better. It's a direct reaction to this
that I (and all of us at SFCS) work hard to build
environments that go beyond just providing
those things but that also use aspects of the
design to actually slow the cognitive decline
and try to preserve function in residents for as
long as possible.

How has immersing yourself
in the resident experience
informed your work?
During my early work with design for dementia, I was struck by the idea that what
we don't understand scares us and we try to
control it. That's just natural human behavior,
and we were doing this to elders with cognitive impairments. I felt like we needed to find
a way to get past the fear and go deeper into
understanding. One of the toughest things
about the disease is that, once affected,
seniors often lose the ability to communicate
to others what's really happening to them, so
we often guess and make assumptions about
the resulting behaviors and outcomes that are
demonstrated.

ALISE O'BRIEN

What does championing for
better design mean to you?

Manchester Commons, Erie, Pa.

I believe it means challenging the status
quo, accepted beliefs, and opinions and not
being afraid to be wrong and make mistakes. It means pushing the perceived limits
of yourself, your colleagues, and even your
clients. It means striving every day to make
a difference.
Summer 2018 * EFAmagazine.com

https://www.efamagazine.com/design-champions http://www.EFAmagazine.com

Environments for Aging - Summer 2018

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