Design for Life: Epione Health Village Rosebank

Design for Life: Epione Health Village Rosebank

WORDS Michaela Stehr


The Epione Health Villages team, in collaboration with architecture firm Frankie Pappas, transformed an old office building into a community-based healthcare facility – Epione Health Village Rosebank.

The driver behind this new development is a critical one: providing accessible and affordable primary healthcare to all South Africans. Yet this is no stock-standard rollout of austere, unfriendly community clinics: the Epione Health Villages (EHV) team is rethinking the concept, and striving to bring dignity and warmth to healthcare through the design of space and furniture.

From waiting rooms to consulting rooms, every area of the Epione Health Village Rosebank (EHVR) has been carefully considered to create a calming and serene environment, eliminating extra stress. After all, who needs any more of that when they’re not feeling well?

Epione Health Village
Making the most of every space, a long passageway is flanked by nook seating on either side.

“Why not create private nooks with great light, plants and ventilation, or a coffee shop and bagel stand on a public plaza?” says Ant Vervoort of Frankie Pappas. “These are the stories with which we approach our designs – we interrogate the everyday and find the extraordinary in it.”

READ MORE: Frankie Pappas Award-winning House of the Big Arch and House of the Tall Chimneys

Using architecture, the team planned to merge the spaces with EHV’s driving philosophy – that healthcare is one of the highest expressions of humanity. “Does it follow the status quo of hospitals being places of cold light, incessant bleeps and the smell of antiseptic? Or do we produce a hospital where sunlight, running water and the smell of petrichor are the sensorial keystones? I don’t think it’s controversial to argue for the latter,” Ant says.

Epione Health Village
Nook seating at the entrance to each examination room.

The EHVR project is where this healthcare model is being perfected, but it will eventually be replicated many times over. If you sort out basic medical issues (like family care and women’s health) early on, you can prevent further complications down the line. It’s a concept that applies to all South African communities.

Epione Health Village
All furniture has been designed for maximum utility of space; one of the examination rooms.

“Our flagship facility in Rosebank is our hub, servicing not only the affluent, but also low-income neighbourhoods such as Alexandra,” says EHV founder Garikai Govati. “We will continue this path of inclusivity with our next facilities in South Africa, eventually taking it to the rest of Africa. Our goal is to have a presence in every South African province in the next 24 to 36 months via a hub-and-spoke model.”

Epione Health Village
A closer look at the construction of an examination bench.

A series of furniture has been designed especially for the clinics. All the pieces allow for maximum utility of space, and interaction between the medical staff and their patients.

So, for example, the team are prototyping locally produced timber furniture that offers storage for supplies without having a cold, clinical edge. As Dr Samantha Fee of EHVR explains, “It all comes down to patient satisfaction – seeing their faces when they enter the space and watching the children interact with it, calming down before they go for what would have otherwise been a traumatic experience of health-seeking.”

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