New opening
Norden House: a ‘household’ approach to dementia care
The Care Home Environment editor Matt Seex visited Norden House – the Healthcare Management Trust’s new specialist dementia home in West Sussex – to chat with manager Annie Lewis about the home’s ‘household’ model of care and its subtle but effective approach to ensuring residents living with dementia maintain their dignity and independence
Located just south of Climping – a small West Sussex village a few miles from the seaside towns of Littlehampton, Worthing, and Bognor Regis, and the historic market town of Arundel – Norden House is a 64- bed, specialist dementia care home set in picturesque, rural surroundings. Developer Brackley Investments – which
specialises in care sector development – sourced the site and obtained planning for the £10m build, enlisting operator HMT (the Healthcare Management Trust) before construction began on this turnkey project. While the basic design of Norden House – the shape, form, size, and scale of the home, as well as the number of beds – was ‘set’ at the design and planning stage, HMT helped to shape the internal environment of the home before building works – courtesy of contractor Highwood Construction – got underway.
Norden House was designed by Brackley alongside London-based architects Hunters, incorporating University of Stirling dementia design guidance, and with the aim of creating a care home that feels homely rather than institutional (aided, as it turned out, by the planning process, which limited the height of the building). The home was scheduled to open in May 2023, but the pandemic and the war in Ukraine conspired to delay the opening of Norden House by around six months. Having worked with HMT on previous
projects, Frank Beirne Fabrics handled the interior design of Norden House, under the supervision of the manager of the home, Annie Lewis. I visited Norden House in April to meet with Annie to discuss the unique care offering at the home, which at the time of my visit, had been open less than three months, with nine residents already calling Norden House home.
June 2024
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A household model We began, over a coffee in Norden House’s well-appointed café, by discussing the home’s first residents. “It’s a lovely story,” Annie tells me. “Bognor Regis is about five miles from here and there was a convent called Saint Juliana’s. It was a convent for Servite sisters. They’re all in their late 80s and early 90s, needing varying degrees of care, but because the convent was an old building, it wasn’t fit for purpose. “[The sisters] were going to be split up and go to different care homes. And I just happened to be going with a colleague of mine to do a pre-assessment for one of our sister homes. “I explained [about Norden House] and the sisters asked: ‘Can we all come
Eight distinct households arranged over two floors
together?’ So, they’ve all come together – they’ve taken a household, so they’ve got their own little community within the care home.”
Norden House, then, is set out as eight distinct ‘households’ arranged over the home’s two floors, each of which can accommodate up to eight residents. “For every household there’s a shared kitchenette in the middle,” explains Annie. “And then either side they’ve got their own dining room, and their own lounge, and at the end of the household we have what we call reading areas – a beautiful quiet area at the end of the corridor. So, the space we have for eight [residents] is huge. “Each of the lounges – they’ve all got different colour schemes, so if you have somebody with dementia, they will associate that colour scheme with where they live. Whereas, if they were all the same, they could go into another lounge. So you’ve got that association,” she continues.
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All images courtesy of Brackley Investments and Hunters architects
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