High-Tech, High-Touch

Hoag’s new Surgical Pavilion brings innovation, humanity and hospitality to healthcare.

By Liz Stinson

When healthcare providers arrive at the new Hoag Surgical Pavilion in Irvine, California, they pull into the parking garage, exit their vehicle and leave the usual idea of medical design behind. From the garage, they emerge onto a walkway surrounded by lush native plants and trees. They proceed past a shaded pergola offering park-like seating before reaching a travertine wall that ushers them into the staff entrance, where elegant locker rooms await.

This journey is designed to be a moment of peaceful decompression for the physicians and nurses who are there to perform high-stakes operations. “We thought about the staff entry as something exclusive,” says Rick D’Amato, Design Director at LPA Design Studios. “We even likened it to entering a country club.”

This choreography is representative of the larger transformation Hoag’s Irvine campus is undergoing as LPA reshapes the hospital experience into an elvated example of what 21st-century healthcare can be — for both providers and patients. To wit: The Surgical Pavilion houses eight state-of-the-art operating rooms that are designed for optimized performance and specialized surgeries. An intensive care unit features amenity-rich rooms for patients, each with enclosed restrooms — a rare asset for families — and a waiting area with an outdoor terrace that also provides future flexibility for the space. Staff amenities include a private outdoor garden, light-filled office spaces and a lounge with nature views.

The pavilion opens at a moment when healthcare staff counts are shrinking and hospitals are in an arms race to attract the best minds. The building’s amenities are more than creature comforts, though — they’re a stance on what innovative healthcare looks like when a client puts patient care and providers’ health first. It’s “high-tech, high-touch” design: design that balances and elevates both the technological and the human.

“We’ve got some powerhouse hospitals around here, so they are all vying for the best talent,” says D’Amato. “Hoag had to prove to these providers that this is the best place to work.”

A Split-Level Design

While the Surgical Pavilion debuted in early May, the entirety of Hoag’s expanded campus is set to open in the fall. For years, the hospital occupied a total of two buildings, including the main tower, on a site that was surrounded by parking and underutilized green space. But in the new master plan, LPA proposed creating a wellness village made up of a series of walkable, interconnected buildings instead of the typical high-rise tower. Much like Irvine itself — composed of different residential villages and commercial centers — Hoag’s new campus consists of many low-rise buildings, none of which exceed three stories.

“It was about making the campus have the look and feel of Irvine, where indoor and outdoor spaces are equally weighted in creating the experience,” says Casey Chapin, an architect and project designer at LPA.

This design decision resulted in increased sightlines and abundant natural light across the campus, but it also created some immovable constraints for where the Surgical Pavilion could be located. Hoag’s team knew the building needed to be near the existing emergency room and diagnostic imaging department, so LPA’s team zeroed in on land next to the parking garage that could give patients easy access to both the ER and Surgical Pavilion, and tie into the existing adjacent tower.

Typically, a surgical unit would sprawl across a single floor for efficiency’s sake, but in the case of Hoag, it needed to extend vertically on two levels to fit into the allocated space — posing a unique design challenge. “The expansion of the campus bed count required a new surgical platform, alongside the innovative technology that goes with that, but we knew a big one-story department — which would have been the easiest thing — was not feasible with the site constraints,” says Carrie Bridge, a senior project manager in the Healthcare practice at LPA. Instead, the team designed the pavilion as three levels, each with its own strategic function that creates a natural flow between floors.

The first floor is centered around the welcome and pre-operative experience. Patients and caregivers enter the lobby, where they are greeted with a registration space that D’Amato describes as “more like a hotel than a hospital.” The lobby, defined by soft curves and rounded edges, has minimal seating, which is enabled by the concierge-like streamlined check-in experience. Before surgery, patients are routed to a pre-op room to meet with their providers, while doctors and others get ready in the first-floor locker rooms that open onto a private garden. There, they can spend time mentally preparing for upcoming operations. “These contemplative outdoor spaces allow doctors to quiet their mind and prepare for what’s a very high-stress environment to work in,” Chapin says.

This thinking extends to Hoag visitors, too. The café, previously located in a windowless basement, was moved to the first floor of the existing portion of the hospital. The space layers art and soft lighting to engender a low-stress environment, and a large outdoor terrace gives visitors the opportunity to recenter themselves in nature. “Distraction spaces like this are crucial in dealing with emotional and physical stress in these environments, whether you’re a patient, family member or healthcare professional,” D’Amato notes.

A Next-Gen OR

On the second floor, the surgical platform features eight high‑tech operating rooms — including a hybrid OR and a future dedicated cardiovascular OR. Contrasting the dark tunnels of other surgical departments, patients pass through corridors with full‑height fritted glass windows that bathe them in sunlight before and after an operation. Though the operating rooms are sealed for sterility, windows flank the scrub sinks, bringing natural light into a space that typically requires artificial lighting.

These hits of sunlight are designed to regulate the circadian rhythm of doctors and nurses, who can spend hours on end in windowless ORs in other facilities. “These allow for some borrowed daylight,” says Bridge. “We’re trying to infiltrate these spaces with light when we can because it can help medical staff in the long term.

Immediately after surgery, patients are moved into the adjacent post‑anesthesia care unit (PACU), where a recovery bay is flanked by a continuous band of windows that let in sun and give views of the surrounding landscape. “Normally PACUs are inboard — you’re coming out of anesthesia and you’re not really seeing the view — but it still affects your system,” Bridge says. “We really championed a view of nature and natural daylight access from the moment you leave the OR, and at each step. Studies continuously show the benefits of natural daylight on patients, so we used daylight and nature as a driver for the planning and design throughout the facility.”

From the PACU, patients will generally be discharged or moved to a med-surge room on the north campus, but the most sensitive will go up one floor to the intensive care unit.

The pavilion includes a 24‑bed ICU on the third floor, directly above the operating rooms, ensuring patients can move from surgery to intensive care with minimal travel. Each of the ICU rooms features a large picture window that looks out onto a rock garden below. Wood panels frame the edges of each window, so patients never look into another room — only outward to natural materials and sky. The effect is subtle but intentional, a moment of calm in a place that’s often defined by stress.

For those who may spend significant time upstairs, LPA designed a family area with a balcony — a rarity in an ICU, and one that takes advantage of the Orange County climate — complete with medical gas hookups so beds can be rolled outside safely. “With most other hospitals, it’s about ‘How many rooms can we fit into this floor plan to maximize our bed count?’” says Chapin. “The fact that we were able to carve out this corner to provide a respite zone really shows Hoag’s dedication to making a phenomenal ICU experience for patients and families.”

Merging Hospitality and Hospital

Every detail of the pavilion is shaped around patient comfort, right down to nooks in the ICU rooms custom-designed to hold flowers. “You know when you’re visiting someone and there’s never any place to put the flowers?” D’Amato asks. “Now there’s a niche for them.”

LPA brought on a feng shui consultant who helped shape the entries, seating and circulation to support intuitive wayfinding and “energy flow.” D’Amato says the pavilion’s seating was designed around the idea of purposeful distraction. Across the public areas, seating is oriented toward gardens, daylight and circulation rather than TVs. Instead of a single monolithic waiting room, the pavilion’s public spaces are carved up into multiple seating types so people can “find their niche,” whether that’s semiprivate nooks or clusters for families.

Throughout the space, D’Amato and his team worked to bring a more gentle, human touch with wood paneling and softer materials. For D’Amato, the focus on hospitality is about more than aesthetics: It’s a way to actively shape recovery. “It’s about understanding how people interact with space, how they interact with each other — and what empowers an individual to heal faster.”

Liz Stinson is a writer and editor who has covered design for publications including Wired, Fast Company, Architectural Digest and more.