The Small House, a new assisted living residence within the broader campus of The Forest at Duke, adopts the small-house model of care that creates a caring and distinguished space for its residents. It combines nine 10-person households across two wings that are connected by a space that houses amenities, administrative offices, and vertical circulation. Each pair of households has an assigned staff, and the single residences orbit around a full-service kitchen, dining area, living room, den, and screened porch.
The programming goals of the project were to produce a true sense of home for occupants who needed more care than The Forest’s independent living options. The client also wanted to create continuous connections between the resident populations to avoid a sense of isolation—a common perception of skilled care and assisted living communities. The design incorporates elements such as building orientation—it’s nestled into the surrounding topography—daylighting, biophilic design, and sustainable materials to emphasize its connections to nature. The team went even further, fashioning the building’s layout as an analogy to a tree within a forest. The core “trunk,” for example, contains staffing spaces and amenities, while the “canopy” branching off of it contains the individual households, with lively color palettes and plentiful windows that send dappled sunlight throughout, just as the leaves of a tree would do.
