The elderly care is a part of the city block Skärvet, which is the starting point of Bäckaslöv, a new urban district in Växjö being developed along the railway connecting the city centre to the lake Norra Bergundasjön. The L- shaped building is the first phase and the cornerstone of the city block, offering mixed forms of tenure around a spacious, shared courtyard.

Common areas with good light conditions

The layout organisation is based on arranging all common and neutral areas into a central hub with individual departments located in each respective wing. The core of each department is its dining and living room, an open space reaching from façade to façade. Its large windows and tall ceiling heights provide great daylight conditions.

Spaces for social interaction

The common functions comprise an assembly hall, a conservatory, physiotherapy facility and a greenhouse on the rooftop with a view over the shared courtyard and the green recreation space.

Lively façades

The design and configuration are strongly linked to the construction process. The variation in the façade is rationally achieved by using more joints than façade elements and by combining four sections of different types of tile patterns. The overall design thus resembles a textile pattern or a crocheted table cloth. Entrances, windows and roofs are accentuated by copper-coloured metal sheets, adding warmer tones. The building is designed to achieve LEED Platinum certificate and Skanska’s top level environmental classification.

There are around 850 kilometres between the urban architecture firm Kjellander & Sjöberg in Stockholm and the Setesdal Valley in Norway, a popular holiday destination and also the birthplace of the legendary Norwegian sweater in the 19th century. That is quite a long way, but sometimes such a distance becomes a mere stone‘s throw: this could have been the case when the aforementioned architects designed a retirement home in Växjö, Sweden. Its impressively clinkered facade is certainly reminiscent of the traditional pattern of the popular knitted sweater – and clinker brick slips from Ströher played a key role in its creation: The lively shell of the L-shaped building was cleverly designed using four different clinker patterns, and the textile design was achieved using prefabricated facade elements set in wide gaps.

This sophisticated look recalls Alvar Aalto‘s experimental house in Muuratsalo in Finland, where the Danish architect established the essence of his unparalleled residential architecture. Nature was always the model for his designs, and human well-being was the aim of his architecture. This is also the case for the designers at Kjellander & Sjöberg: the design of the retirement home is their statement on intelligent architecture, which thinks sustainably about its influence on people and their environment. The building‘s surroundings were a big factor in its design, as it is located in the heart of Astrid Lindgren‘s beautiful Småland region.

As the „greenest city in Europe“, environmental sustainability is very important in Växjö. Accordingly, the new retirement home, with 72 residential units, is LEED Platinum-certified as an „extremely high-performance environmentally-friendly building“. In addition, a further award beckons: the eye-catching project has been nominated for the „European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture/Mies van der Rohe Award“, the most prestigious European architecture prize worth 60,000 euros. And clinker brick slips from Ströher play a part in this contemporary architectural discourse.