SAS is proud to announce the opening of their latest project, The Oak Trace Healthcare Center, in Downers Grove, Illinois.
The Ribbon Cutting
Last week, SAS had the opportunity to attend the ribbon cutting for The Oak Trace Healthcare Center in Downers Grove, Illinois. This ribbon cutting is the culmination of four years of hard work, long hours and dedication for SAS Architects & Planners and our project team. We’d like to personally thank Lifespace Communities for including us in this memorable event and allowing us to participate in the process of revitalizing the Oak Trace campus. It was our distinct honor to be part of the team and the end result is something we are truly proud of. We could not hope for a better evening than one filled with friends, cocktails and great conversations.
We were fortunate to start this journey with the master planning of the campus in 2015. The design effort went through a number of iterations as our team worked through the program, heard the needs of our client and came to understand the campus community. While the opening of the Healthcare Center is a large portion of the project completed to date, this marks the end of phase one of three. We are just getting started! We would like to mention that the success of this project would not be possible without the continual efforts of our clients, Lifespace Communities and Greystone Communities, our construction partner, Pepper Construction, and our design team, Perkins Eastman, GeWalt Hamilton, Teska Associates, Gannett Fleming, Edge Associates, RTM Engineering and Direct Supply. Thank you to all team members who made this moment possible!
About The Oak Trace Senior Living Community
Oak Trace is a senior living community which has been offering services to seniors within the Chicago area for over 45 years. In 2015, SAS was approached to analyze the existing campus in order to develop a master plan on how to reposition the current continuum of care retirement community to offer a new, state of the art Healthcare Center and Independent Living apartments. With a tight site, the underlying principle behind the repositioning was to maximize the future potential of the campus while minimizing the impact on the existing residents. SAS and its partners were able to develop a plan which would create a unified, connected campus surrounded by green space.
Phase I of this project is the creation of a new Healthcare Center which features 66 Assisted Living apartments, 28 Memory Support suites, 32 Short Term Rehab suites, and 62 Skilled Nursing suites. The design premise behind the Healthcare Center was the creation of intimate neighborhoods surrounded by common areas and framed by views to the exterior environment. The Assisted Living apartment wing is connected to the Healthcare wing by a series of Common areas including a two-story dining room and great room, library, refreshment station, fitness center, salon, gift shop and multi-purpose room. The unprecedented amount of Commons areas surrounding the Assisted Living and Healthcare Suites are more akin to Independent Living than Healthcare spaces and will help create a unified campus feel at the completion of Phase II.
Phase II is currently in design and will feature Independent Living apartments, the creation of a new entry into the existing Independent Living Building and Independent Living Villas, which offer apartment-like accommodations in a “townhouse-like” setting. This provides a much smaller scale to IL than found in a typical building wing as the Villas will be a group of up to ten apartments, providing more distinct views and landscaping to each Villa group and the campus.
The new Independent Living building will provide a new entry sequence for the campus and connect to the existing Independent Living building and new Healthcare Center to create a unified campus and frame the new exterior courtyard. This outdoor area, which is framed by commons areas and circulation within each building, will enrich the current campus and provide a way finding element to assist in navigating between the levels of care. For more information about the phasing for Oak Trace, see our project page.
Phase III of this project includes various interior renovations of the existing 1st floor common areas to complete and tie each of the buildings into one another. We cannot wait to show you more as we continue the next phase and see this campus vision realized!
