“We wanted the waiting room to maintain the character that it had with the windows, moulding and fi replace, but the conditions of the space had to be upgraded,” Lyons remembers. “It basically was retained but redone. Then we changed the layout. There are exam rooms in the front where there were none before; all the exam rooms are different because they are basically spaces we reused from the existing building.” The exam rooms serve as a transition
between the warm, homey feel of the re- ception area and the brightly lit modern new wing of the clinic, which holds the pharmacy, technician stations and surgery area. “The back looks
like you’re in a brand new building; the surgery area is
aluminum and glass and obviously a state-of-the-art hospital,” Mark notes. “If clients have to take their pet back to
38 RETROFIT // September October 2012
the surgery room they see how technologi- cal our clinic really is.”
Construction The Paradises originally planned to move
the clinic to another location during con- struction, but fi nding a space proved diffi - cult, and the logistics of moving equipment and animals threatened to be a nightmare. A contractor suggested construction could take place around the day-to-day operations of the clinic. “What made it doable was the site supervisor, Paul McVay of Bowerman Associates [Providence, R.I.],” Mark says. “He made it a point to know our business and patterns. If he knew he was going to do something that would disrupt our service, he would sit me down and explain it.” Construction began by demolishing a
small addition on the Victorian house that was not original to the home. The Paradises had been performing surgery and x-rays in the addition, so these services were moved
into the already cramped main house. “We had to move surgery to the second-fl oor storage area. We were transporting animals up and down stairs, which was not ideal,” Mark remembers. The Paradises were interested in being
as environmentally friendly as possible with their new facility. Initially they wanted a geo- thermal system to heat and cool the build- ing but were talked out of it by a mechanical engineer who said they would be unhappy with the technology. During design, Lyons asked Mark where he wanted the six out- door compressors for the air-conditioning units. “I didn’t want them anywhere,” Mark says. “We were trying to recreate a home and people coming into somebody’s home shouldn’t have to walk by these noisy condi- tioning units with their pets. We now have eight 400-foot-deep wells for the geother- mal system under our parking lot.” The closed-loop geothermal system
pumps water through the facility using the (continues on page 40)