Parterre Designer Conversation Series: Jennifer Wilcynski

 

As Orcutt | Winslow Senior Interior Designer and Associate Jennifer Wilcynski said herself, sometimes failure can teach you more than your successes. After initially aspiring to become a veterinarian, unforeseen obstacles altered her career path. She found herself stumbling upon interior design at community college before transferring and graduating from one of the most prestigious interior design programs in the country.

Now a seasoned veteran with 17 years of experience in the field, her primary area of focus is in healthcare design. Wilcynski took a break from the beautiful Arizona sunshine to participate in the latest edition of the Parterre Designer Series.

---

Parterre: What made you initially want to pursue interior design? And what do you enjoy most about being a designer?

I’ve always said if I have to be away from my family it has to be for a good reason. I do believe that my strengths are in design. I design for people, I design for the experience; and of all the different types of commercial design I’ve done, I fell in love with healthcare design.

I love that healthcare design supports people. From someone coming into the ER with a heart attack to the beautiful birth of a child to the anxiety people feel before surgery, their experience is shaped by the architecture and design of a space. And the same is true of the spaces we inhabit and are a part of every single day. For me, it’s just a people thing.

Parterre: What do you feel has changed the most about the design industry since you first became a designer?

I realized when I became focused on healthcare design, many of the RFPs request a fully-designed building or interior before interfacing with the end user. I personally want to get to know who I’m designing for, so for me designing without input from the client is really difficult.  This is a trend we’re seeing a lot lately – show the pretty pictures to win a project rather than focusing on working with the people and teams you know and trust.

Parterre: Where do you find inspiration for interior design? Or, what inspires you?

First of all, people inspire me, and their stories inspire me. But I also love to travel, especially to places I don’t know much about and getting to know the people and their customs all inspires me. Even traveling just outside Phoenix, there are some wonderful hikes — and with everything in bloom right now, everything in nature is just inspiring.

Parterre: What is your favorite design trend that you’ve seen in the healthcare industry recently?

Bringing the outdoors in – bringing nature into the interior environment. We all know that nature is healing, we can feel it.  I always try to incorporate some kind of large format nature photography to provide a connection to the natural world.  This is something that people can gaze at or be immersed into which can have a calming effect for patients and staff alike.

Parterre: Are there any past trends you wish would make a comeback?

No, not really. I always want to learn from our past, but I still want to keep on chugging forward. We need to head on into the future.

Parterre: Can you tell us about a recent project you’ve enjoyed being a part of? What drew you to this project?

Up in the White Mountains here in Arizona, we are working on a new Outpatient Campus for a local rural healthcare system. There are three, ground-up buildings – a medical office building, ambulatory surgery center and an administration office building.

Each has their own special story, but what really drew me to this project was a perception issue. This project is located in a small town in northeast Arizona, but the problem was that many people in the community travel back to Phoenix for their healthcare, because they believed they would get better treatment “in the big city.”

It really was just a perception issue that they had, because the local physicians are fantastic and are wholly part of the community. To change the perception of the community we designed a brand-new outpatient facility next to the hospital. That’s what drew me to this project – the people-oriented architecture and design and using the built environment to support that change.

Parterre: What is a common design challenge you see when designing different spaces and how do you overcome it?

I always say lighting and acoustics. Those two, for me, go hand in hand in the aspect that good lighting and good acoustics are not recognized or fully appreciated. People don’t realize they’re in a great space because of great lighting and they can have a real conversation because they can hear one another. Unfortunately, half the time those are the first things to get value-engineered out of a project.

One thing in healthcare design is to have that overall ambient lighting that is okay for everybody, isn’t too glaring and can be soothing. I’m really intrigued by the current findings about circadian lighting – how you can adjust the temperature of the light from the cool morning sunlight at dawn to a bright high noon and then down to the warmer tones at sunset. We’re trying to make the body come back into this circadian rhythm, especially in the ICU, and having that rhythm and getting that REM sleep through lighting just enthralls me.

Acoustics, too, are so important in healthcare spaces. There’s so much going on with all the machinery and discussions and noise of the workplace, it can overload the body and mind. We have to figure out, how do we get those to a good place where bodies can be resting and healing through the lighting and the acoustics of a space?

Parterre: What design element do you typically consider first when designing a space and why?

First I always think about the patient and other possible end users. So I consider the programming for the nursing staff, C-suite and all those things melted into one. Then I put myself in the shoes of the patient, their families, and really try to keep it patient/end-user centric – this also includes staff members.

Then on the interior side once we are at a point of select finishes, I start with the flooring – it takes the most beating with beds and wheelchairs, IVs and all the equipment that goes into a clinical or hospital setting. And, it sets the stage for everything – I start there and work my way up.

Parterre: What is your experience with using Parterre LVT or your general opinion on luxury vinyl?

When I first started dabbling in healthcare design, the cool new thing was wood-grain sheet vinyl. Everyone was on board with that. Now that I have been working more in healthcare, I can’t tell you a project that I haven’t specified a wood plank LVT floor. My clients really love “wood floors”, they love the designability and the flexibility of the LVT products. I haven’t spec’d anything more than LVT in the past 10 years.

For that Outpatient Campus project I mentioned earlier, I was able to place Parterre in all six of their different standard interior finish palette offerings.

Parterre: What is your go-to product or a general design element that you try to incorporate into projects?

I try to incorporate nature into all of my designs. It all looks great whether it’s through the finish selections or those large format photographs.

But it’s not just about setting that stage and then it’s done. In our firm we try to spec products that will last longer than others because we’re trying to be responsible stewards of our Earth. Once the life of that product is over, we find manufacturers that will take it back or even take someone else’s product back and recycle it in some way. We all know that healthcare is a very demanding and harsh environment so we’re trying to be responsible not only to the end user, facility owner and patient, but also to Mother Earth.