Waiting room for a dental practice

The brief

A four surgery dental practice on a first floor above a shop, seeing around 90 patients a day. The waiting room seated fourteen in a single row of linked chairs down two walls, with a low table of magazines in the middle and a television bracketed high in one corner playing a rolling news channel with the sound off.

The practice manager put it plainly: patients arrive anxious and the room makes them worse. She also had a list of practical complaints. Parents with small children had nowhere to sit together. There was no surface to fill in a form on. The reception desk had a queue in front of it that blocked the corridor to surgery one.

What made it difficult

The practice could not close. We agreed two full weekend closures and the rest of the work happened in the evenings after the last patient, which sets the whole approach: everything had to be capable of being made off site and installed fast, and nothing could leave the room unusable at eight the next morning.

Infection control governs surfaces in a clinical setting. Anything a patient touches has to be wipeable and has to survive the alcohol based cleaners used between sessions. That rules out most upholstery fabrics, all untreated timber on arms and backs, and every soft finish that would otherwise make a room feel less clinical.

The reception desk could not move. The server, the phone system and the card terminal all ran back to a comms cupboard behind it, and rewiring was not in the budget. Fire regulations set the upholstery specification and the corridor had to keep a clear 1200mm width.

What we did

We broke the single row of chairs into four groups, seated at different orientations rather than all facing the middle. Fourteen seats stayed fourteen seats, but nobody is now sitting directly opposite a stranger at 2.4m. That one change accounts for most of what people notice.

Two of the groups are a pair of chairs with a fixed table between them at the right height to write on. One is a low bench under the window for parents with children, with a shelf below for bags. The fourth is a single chair on its own by the door, because some people want to sit on their own and there was previously nowhere to do it.

The reception desk stayed where it was and grew a 900mm return at standing height on the corridor side. Patients arriving now queue along the return rather than across the corridor, and the practice got a second surface to work from.

Finishes did the emotional work within the rules. Walls in a warm mid tone rather than the standard clinical white, which reads as calmer without reading as domestic. Chair upholstery in a wipe clean crib five vinyl that has the texture of a woven fabric. A vinyl floor with a warm stone tone. Timber only where nobody touches it, on a slatted screen beside reception that gives the desk some acoustic separation.

The television came out. It was replaced by three framed prints, and the practice reports no complaints about the loss.

Lighting was the last change and the most important. The room had four bare panel fittings on a single switch. It now has a lower general level from the same positions with diffusers, plus wall lights over each seating group. Nobody sits directly under a light source. The reasoning is the same as in any room and is set out in lighting a room in layers.

What it cost

£19,800 against a range of £18,000 to £22,000, with the spread almost entirely in the seating. Contract furniture that meets the fire and cleaning specification is expensive and there is no way around it. The fourteen seats and four tables were £7,100 of the total.

Working in evenings and weekends added roughly 12 per cent to the labour cost. That is the price of not closing, and the practice worked out that closing for a week would have cost them more.

Our fee was £4,976, being a £2,600 design package plus project management at 12 per cent of the build cost. Twelve is the top of our range, and it is what it costs to coordinate evening and weekend working around a practice that never closed. There was no building control application, as nothing structural changed and the room's use was unaltered.

What we would do differently

We underestimated the noise. The room is quieter than it was because of the slatted screen and the softer floor, but a first floor room over a shop with a hard ceiling carries voices from reception further than we expected. An acoustic ceiling raft over the desk would have cost about £900 and we should have put it in the first specification rather than raising it afterwards.