Ronald McDonald House Manitoba

Winnipeg, Canada

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Ronald McDonald House Manitoba

Winnipeg, Canada

Firm

ft3 Architecture Landscape Interior Design

Type

Residential › Multi Unit Housing

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2022

SIZE

25,000 sqft - 100,000 sqft

BUDGET

$10M - 50M

Nestled on the corner of a mature, tree-lined neighbourhood—and a ten-minute walk from the city’s main pediatric health facility—is the new Ronald McDonald House Manitoba (RMHMB). For over 49 years, Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC) has provided families with children requiring hospital care a safe respite during one of life’s most challenging events.

The concept of a home away from home and the health and well-being of the guest families, staff, and volunteers guided the form and function when designing the new house. When families stay at RMHMB, they should feel serene, secure, and stimulated—similar emotions that derive from being in the comfort of your home—with the added support of staff and volunteers.

To underscore this concept formally, we lowered rooflines and cut voids in the mass to mimic a series of townhouses, ensuring that a new, large building in a mainly residential neighbourhood would complement the scale and form of the surrounding duplexes and single residences. Moreover, using window boxes, multi-level terraces, and a large interior courtyard further contextualize the home and its guests to the community, strengthening each person's sense of place.

Designing for play also factored into the new RMH as nurturing a child’s imagination adds to their healing and recovery. A two-story high play structure greets families upon arrival and anchors the building to the site. Inside, imagination infuses itself into the building’s function and fully realized through a sensory Magic Room that showers children with light, colour, and sound, taking them outside of their recovery and into a space of innate joy and happiness.

We also took inspiration from children’s building playblocks when conceptualizing the window boxes framing each suite. The playblock theme appears inside, applied as a wood ceiling treatment throughout the main floor living and dining spaces while bringing cohesion to interior and exterior design elements.

The interior design encourages guest families to spend time together in communal spaces, like the kitchen, where preparing and eating meals as a group can improve mental and physical wellness. Other spaces within the house include a living room with a fireplace, rooms for practicing yoga or watching movies, and amenity rooms with games and crafts. We also designed a meditation room with an exhaust system for Indigenous families who want to smudge. Each interior space aims to provide families with equity and functionality in the house, allowing for more meaningful involvement with one another and the greater RMH community.

Forty individual bedrooms with private washrooms (up from 14 in the original RMHMB house) are located across floors two, three, and four, with larger suites serving kidney or bone marrow transplant patients and their families (for post-transplant isolation). We incorporated critical environment suites on the second floor with enhanced safety and infection controls, including a separate elevator and entry points and dedicated Energy Recovery Ventilators, to offer additional support and security to families.

Guest families also have access to a plethora of natural daylight and exterior views, two more essential components of recovery and healing. Daylight pours in through the windows spanning each floor while bringing sights of nature inside, such as the healing garden and play area in the courtyard.
We used RMHC brand colours of yellow, blue, and grey for accents on the main floor, including hints of these hues in the lighting fixtures, fini
shes, millwork, upholstery, and accent walls throughout the lobby and kitchen. Each residential floor also has one of these colours as a wayfinding tool, appearing on the stair railing, the carpet tiles, and the marker boards outside each suite.

While we emphasized RMHC’s brand colours when selecting and using materials, we were conscious of using materials that would not affect the children's health or recovery from medical treatments and surgery. Indoor air quality (IAQ) proved significant in ensuring a safe recovery, and we incorporated strategies that enhance IAQ such as operable windows, good ventilation rates and air filters, and entryway walk-off mats to trap dirt and debris.
The project reached completion in September 2022. The new RMH House offers an environment built on the intrinsic power of community, allowing families to stay together, and empowering them to stand strong in the face of uncertainty.

Before the new house opened, RMHMB had to turn away over 358 families between 2019 and 2021. This project has given the organization an 186% increase in its mission delivery. In its first year, RMHMB supported 490 families with 9,657 nights of accommodations and savings of $2.9 million in costly, out-of-pocket expenses.

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Ronald McDonald House Manitoba

Winnipeg, Canada

Ronald McDonald House Manitoba

Winnipeg, Canada

Product Spec Sheet

Collaborating Firms

Team