Premisies

The building reflects a welcoming, multicultural, friendly environment, with four birth rooms and 16 postnatal rooms with en-suites.

The building has a multicultural character design, and with the qualities of ‘warmth, welcoming, protective, daylight, privacy.’ Auckland architect Bill Algie’s brief was to design a birth centre more like a ‘cottage maternity home’ than a medical building; it was not to look like a hospital – women who come here are not sick.

The site was chosen to allow a single storey building for ease of use as a birth centre, but offering a domestic character, allowing the building to grow like an organism, according to the use of the rooms and the patterns of public movement. The wing-like articulation of the bedrooms allows these rooms to have angled walls and a sheltering roof shape, offering an enclosing feeling of quiet calm, while giving a facetted exterior to the building.

Natural light enlivens the double height reception lobby, colour is used throughout the building to enhance the specific character and uses of areas, coupled with clear finished natural timbers, washcoat painting in the bedrooms to provide a softness to the rooms.