At the University of Chicago Medicine’s (UChicago Medicine) flagship hospital, Center for Care and Discovery (CCD) – Hyde Park, a prime space on the first floor has become a welcoming dining and respite space for staff, patients, families, and the community at large.

The amenity space previously housed a gift shop, fast-food chain, and coffee shop but had become nearly vacant and outdated. Additionally, the approximately 6,000-square-foot space didn’t take advantage of natural light from the window/curtain wall facing the street.

A separate venue, the hospital’s SKY Café on the seventh floor serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In engagement surveys, hospital staff had expressed a need for more and healthier food options.

“We took in as much information as we could through those formal channels to hear what was critically important to our teams,” says Hasime Adili, director of food service at UChicago Medicine (Chicago). “What we came away with was ‘We want really high-quality food options that we don’t currently have on campus.’ The other component was an area where staff can go to just recharge,”

To update the space, UChicago Medicine brought in Health Hospitality Partners (HHP; St. Louis), a healthcare amenities company, to revive the first-floor food hall and manage it. The project team also included Designers, Architects, Artists, and Makers (DAAM; Chicago) and Figure, a San-Francisco-based architectural collective that had worked with HHP on past projects.

Setting food space renovation goals

Elyse Agnello, founding principal of DAAM, says a goal of the project was to create “a space that is rich in natural and timeless materials that elevate the storefront.” During the renovation, the design team replaced walnut-stained wood on the walls and dark furniture with brighter materials, including white oak paneling.

Interior walls that previously were used to cordon off the hall’s three vendors were removed, but large round supporting columns near the center of the space had to remain. To minimize the columns as a barrier to clear circulation within the space, the design team painted the structures in a neutral gray color and wrapped them three-quarters of the way up from the floor with a silver material that gives them a reflective sheen.

New white ceiling tiles, recessed lighting with LED light cans, and soft pendant lights over a row of seating also help to brighten the space.

Opened in September, the new food hall now houses three vendors, including Sip of Hope Coffee, Burrito Beach, and fast-casual food concept Root & Sprig.

Agnello says the new materials and color palette create a universal canvas that allows each brand to be uniquely expressed without distracting from the unified aesthetic of the food hall.

“The Burrito Beach graphics and logo are very colorful, very saturated, and they’re very forward and bold in terms of their look and feel. Sip of Hope is more monochrome and very neutral in some ways. We tried to create a design that could simultaneously hold both,” she says.

Robert McCune is senior editor at Healthcare Design magazine and can be reached at [email protected].