When The Care Home Interiors Company approached the interior design of Trent Bridge Care Home, the project presented a distinctive challenge. The site’s compact footprint meant the home would be built vertically, arranged over five floors rather than spread across a wider horizontal plan.
For a care environment, this immediately requires careful consideration. Vertical living can create complexity for residents, staff and visitors if not thoughtfully designed. It can affect orientation, wayfinding, atmosphere, movement and the sense of connection between spaces. However, rather than viewing the five-storey layout as a limitation, The Care Home Interiors Company treated it as the defining opportunity of the scheme.
The home’s position in West Bridgford, Nottingham, offers extraordinary views across some of the city’s most recognisable landmarks, including Trent Bridge Cricket Ground, Nottingham Forest and Notts County football stadiums, Nottingham Castle, the original Trent Bridge, the River Trent, the surrounding parkland and civic buildings. These views became central to the interior design thinking, not as a decorative feature, but as a vital part of the resident experience.
In care home design, outlook matters. A view is not simply something to look at; it can support wellbeing, orientation, memory, conversation and emotional connection. For residents, particularly those living with dementia or changes in perception, familiar landmarks can provide reassurance and a sense of place. They can help people understand where they are, feel connected to the world beyond the building and remain linked to the communities and histories that shaped their lives.
At Trent Bridge, the design brief therefore went beyond creating an attractive luxury care environment. The ambition was to create interiors that made intelligent use of the home’s elevated position, drawing the outside in and using the views as a way to not just support daily life within the building but direct people to outside spaces of the balconies and roof terrace.
The roof terrace and garden spans the footprint of the care home. It provides residents with access to an elevated outdoor space that captures some of the best views across Nottingham. In a home with a small ground-level footprint, this top-floor terrace becomes especially important. It offers openness, air, light and perspective. It also provides a meaningful destination within the building; somewhere to visit, enjoy, share with family and experience as part of everyday life.
This sense of destination is significant. In a multi-level care home, each floor must have purpose and character. Residents need to feel that movement through the building leads somewhere worthwhile. The design must avoid repetition and institutional uniformity, which can make floors feel interchangeable and disorientating. Instead, interior cues, visual interest, materials, artwork, furniture placement and views all contribute to a more legible environment.
For The Care Home Interiors Company, the focus was on creating spaces that were navigable, recognisable and emotionally engaging. The design does not simply reference Nottingham in a surface-level way. It uses the home’s location and outlook to create interiors that feel rooted in place. This supports a deeper sense of belonging. Residents are not removed from the local landscape; they are placed in closer relationship with it.
The views also informed the atmosphere of the home. The interiors were designed to feel joyful, playful and homely, while still retaining the quality and refinement expected of a contemporary care setting. This balance is central to the company’s approach. Care home interiors should not feel clinical or over-designed. They must work practically, withstand daily use and support care delivery, but they must also feel warm, layered and familiar.
At Trent Bridge, that meant creating spaces that residents could enjoy emotionally as well as physically. The interiors needed to encourage conversation, prompt memory and offer comfort. A view of the cricket ground, the river or the city skyline can become a talking point. It can trigger recollections of match days, walks by the river, family outings, local pride or personal history. These moments matter. They are part of how design can support identity and connection in later life.
The idea of elevated wellbeing is particularly relevant to this project. The vertical nature of the building allows residents to experience their surroundings from a different perspective. Light, skyline, distance and outlook all have a powerful effect on mood. In care environments, where some residents may spend much of their time indoors, access to natural light and meaningful views can make a considerable difference to daily wellbeing.
This is especially important when designing for people whose world may have become smaller due to age, frailty, cognitive change or reduced mobility. A carefully designed environment can expand that world again. It can provide visual connection, sensory interest and a sense of participation in the life of the community outside.
The project also reflects a wider shift in care home interiors. The most successful care environments are no longer judged by how luxurious they appear in isolation, but by how well they support the people who live, work and visit there. Good design must consider orientation, independence, dignity, memory, comfort, family connection and emotional wellbeing. It must understand how residents experience space, not just how a space photographs.
For The Care Home Interiors Company, this is where specialist care home design becomes most powerful. It is not simply about creating beautiful rooms. It is about understanding how people live within those rooms, how they move through a building, how they recognise where they are and how their surroundings can continue to offer joy, familiarity and connection.
About Care Home Interiors
Since 2001, Kerry Southern-Reason has led The Care Home Interiors Company, a multi-award-winning team of designers, craftsmen, and installers, delivering exceptional design. With over 102 years of combined expertise, the team is dedicated to creating distinctive, comfortable, and sustainable care home interiors providing in-house manufacturing, full installation, producing soft furnishings, upholstery, and cabinetry. Over the years, Kerry Southern-Reason has become a pioneer in dementia interior design. This expertise has led to the company securing the Healthcare Design Award in 2016, 2020, 2022 and 2023 in the dementia design and best interior design categories. A transformative interiors company, forever moving forward, the company seeks new directions with one focus, to create safe but exciting care home interiors. Remarkably each design remains true to the company’s commitment that you will never see an interior scheme repeated. Each as unique as the one before and all produced to varying budgets. The company’s symbol is a Butterfly, a mantra for change, transition, adaptation, and growth. This symbol is testament to the company’s commitment to be at the forefront of care home interior design.
If you’d like to feature your news or stories on SBID.org, get in touch to find out more.
If you’d like to become SBID Accredited, click here for more information.
There are few sectors where interior design carries as much weight, emotionally, functionally and socially, as it does in the care home environment. These are not transient spaces. They are homes for people in the final chapter of their lives, places where dignity, identity and wellbeing must be nurtured through design as skilfully as they are through care.
Yet for far too long, care environments have been shaped by compromise: catalogue solutions, institutional furniture, and layouts that prioritise efficiency over humanity. At The Care Home Interiors Company, they design with a different question in mind: How can interiors actively support living, ageing and thriving?
Elizabeth Gardens is a flagship collaboration with Porthaven Care Homes and exemplifies what becomes possible when a project is shaped by ambition, innovation and deep respect for the people who will inhabit it. It represents a new design vocabulary for care, one that embraces emotional warmth, practicality and craftsmanship in equal measure.
Care environments require details that go far beyond aesthetics. They need to soothe, to orientate, to enable. They must feel familiar but never clinical, elegant but never intimidating. Because of this, their role as interior designers extends far beyond design.
As designers and manufacturers, they produce what the space demands rather than what a catalogue dictates. A recessed bookcase that softens a long corridor. A built-in alcove seat that turns an unused corner into a place of cosy connection. Joinery that feels domestic, not institutional. Furniture scaled for safety, dignity and independence.
These bespoke interventions matter because: - They are tailored to the building’s footprint - They maximise every inch of space - They create familiar, homely features rather than institutional add-ons - They withstand the realities of daily life in care settings - Above all, they are designed with the resident experience at the heart
This ability to design and manufacture cohesively allows us to shape care environments that genuinely feel like home, places grounded in comfort, belonging and emotional reassurance.
Elizabeth Gardens stands as a testament to the power of purposeful interior design. A home that blends luxury with warmth, sophistication with softness, and beautiful detailing with practical enablement.
More than a completed project, it represents the belief that the care sector deserves design excellence, not as an added luxury, but as a fundamental component of wellbeing.
Elizabeth Gardens is a home where residents feel proud to live, where families feel instantly welcomed, and where care teams are supported through thoughtful layout, lighting and spatial planning. It challenges assumptions. It elevates experience. It proves that care environments can be both functional and inspiring.
Design empowers; its impact is immediate.
Join SBID
Find out more about our flexible membership structure.
By subscribing, you agree to be added to SBID’s mailing list. As an industry’s standard bearer organisation, we strive to bring you the most up to date news and access to exclusive industry content through our various newsletters.
First Name
Last Name
Email Address
I accept the SBID Terms of Use