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 holistic health and well-being of the guest families, staff, and volunteers guided the form and function of our design for the new house. When families stay at RMHMB, it should evoke feelings of serenity, security, and stimulation—similar emotions that derive from being in the comfort of your home—underscored by the support of staff and volunteers.
To communicate 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 would further contextualize the home and its guests to the community, strengthening each person's sense of place.
While the building resides in an economically disadvantaged community, it intervenes to enhance the social health and vitality of the surrounding area, including removing the site from the Manitoba Contaminated Sites list. As the house lives in a dense location with existing infrastructure, we rehabilitated the site (thus removing it from the list) by conserving land and resources while reducing travel distances for families to the hospital and essential amenities such as a grocery store, pharmacy, restaurants, hair care, retail, and other community services.
The building features four floors plus an underground parking level spanning the entire site. 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.
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, finishes, 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, superior ventilation rates and air filters, and entryway walk-off mats to trap dirt and debris.
Designing for play factored heavily into the new RMHMB as nurturing a child’s imagination adds to their healing and recovery. A two-story high play structure greets families on arrival and anchors the building to the site. We further encouraged playful curiosity by infusing imagination into the building’s function. A sensory Magic Room fully realizes this concept, showering children with light, colour, and sound while taking them outside their recovery and into a space of innate joy and happiness.
The entrance to the Magic Room sits in the main lobby behind a nondescript door. Once inside, children see a plethora of dancing light and colour arriving in gentle waves across each wall of the 100-square-foot space. A playful ambiance of sound also accompanies the waves of colour and light, directing them to play a game to reach their prize. Once the children have successfully played the game, another door opens to a storage room filled with rows upon rows of toys where children, having won their game, can reap the rewards of their play.
We 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’s living and dining spaces while bringing cohesion to interior and exterior design elements.
The spatial arrangement and integration of interspersed program elements encourage movement, gathering, and healing, allowing for moments of community and wellness. Guest families can spend time in communal spaces, like the kitchen, where preparing and eating meals together can improve mental and physical well-being. 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.
As the natural environment is critical to recovery and wellness, we emphasized daylight and views in our design to ensure ample access to both. Light pours through the windows spanning each floor while bringing sights of nature inside, including the healing garden and play area in the large south-west courtyard.
This courtyard acts as the focal point of the landscape design, featuring a walking loop, play structure, gazebo, vegetable gardens, plantings, and various seating areas. With safety and wellness of primary importance, the building mass is pushed to the street to create a protected and safe outdoor play area with access to sunlight. It’s an active and dynamic space that's open yet protected by the building.
The new home performs 28% better than the provincial energy code due to a high-performance building envelope, energy-efficient Variable Refrigerant Flow mechanical system, and LED lighting with occupancy and daylight sensors. The project places 85% of its parking spaces underground, decreasing the heat island effect and high stormwater runoff volumes caused by expansive asphalt parking surfaces. A landscaped green roof covers a portion of the parkade, further managing stormwater runoff and providing a valuable amenity for RMHMB guests.
Other sustainable interventions we implemented included water-source heat pumps (hot water reaches the heat pumps via two high-efficiency natural gas condensing boilers), ventilation air serves all floors via a central ERV (excluding the second-floor critical environment suites with dedicated ERVs), low-flow plumbing fixtures with domestic hot water supplied via high-efficiency gas-fired condensing storage water heaters (97% thermal efficiency), and LED light fixtures with occupancy sensors and daylight sensors.
Finally, to further reduce energy costs that would better serve guest services and amenities, we’ve allowed for the installation of a rooftop solar PV panel that can generate over 6% of the building’s total annual energy needs on-site.
The project reached completion in September 2022. 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.
The new RMHMB 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.
