The Client
Mental health facilities are too often unwieldy, impersonal and intimidating. This 36,000sf center was designed to prove otherwise. GRAND Mental Health (GRAND) is a high-performing nonprofit organization that aspires to “change the course of communities” in Oklahoma by improving mental health care for its citizens. Its Stillwater center draws service users from the entire county, yet its goal of providing accessible quality care was stifled when functions were split between two outdated leased buildings that served neither staff nor service users adequately.
Forest for the Trees (FFTT) was tasked with creating GRAND’s first community-based “Continuum of Care” campus, housing all services in one location, with room to grow.
The People
People are the experts of their experiences. With this as their guiding principle, FFTT set out to design with – not for – the people of GRAND. Leadership, staff, service users engaged through co-design sessions, interviews, observations, contributing insights into how care was delivered and experienced. Input was distilled into a project brief with a single organizing focus: wellbeing. A collaborative consultant team – civil, landscape, structural, MEP, building code, acoustic – brought the vision to life.
The Context
The 13.5-acre site slopes approximately twenty feet from southeast to northwest. Rather than engineering that away, the building embraces it – descending gently westward, offsetting two feet between each wing. One-story construction aligns in scale with the adjacent residential neighborhood. Brick colors and pattern recall the “red dirt” particular to this part of Oklahoma.
The Design
User insights guided design decisions. Each wing serves a distinct population – infants and children, teens and adults, and adults in crisis – interconnected by multifunctional transitional spaces.
The building form intentionally creates courtyards landscaped with indigenous vegetation. “Walk and Talk” was already a therapeutic program, so meandering pathways and seats were designed to enable it. As the facility expands northward, courtyards will remain, enclosed and secure.
Floor-to-ceiling windows bookend long circulation spines blurring the inside-outside boundary until removed to connect future hallways.
Sustainable strategies include abundant daylighting, a white PVC roof that minimizes heat gain, low VOC materials, dark sky friendly lighting and rain gardens that manage stormwater naturally.
The Experience
Service users enter a light-filled, welcoming building and can choose therapy in a room with a view or outdoors. An accessible ramp between two wings doubles as a children’s waiting space, designed to delight, with artificial turf and learning steps that encourage play.
The Urgent Recovery Center operates around the clock with its own discreet public entrance and a private sally port, preserving the dignity of people in their most vulnerable moments.
Lightwells and windows reinforce circadian rhythms, ensuring daylight and views in every therapy space. Lily pad ceiling clouds manage acoustics. Colors, textures and natural materials ground the interiors. These are not aesthetic choices – they are evidence-based commitments to biophilic principles shown to reduce anxiety, support recovery and promote wellbeing of service users and caregivers alike.
Shaped by the people it serves, this building doesn’t just facilitate mental health care – it embodies it.
