Healthy Practices: Interior Design Healthcare Giants 1-40

We're noticing a trend: Of the 40 firms that compose our list of Interior Design Giants that find benefit in the health-care industry, 16 have been designing wellness facilities for 50 years or more. Furthermore, the average number of years all these firms have been honing skills in health-care design is 47. Clearly, expertise in this specialized field pays. (For ideas on how Giants are diversifying their business into a variety of areas, see page 125.) Fees from health-care projects accounted for 46 percent of each health-care Giant's total fees. Health-care design fees rose 20 percent since last year, and fees are expected to rise 6 percent in the coming year. The firms combined to work on a total of more than 105 million square feet of health-care space in the last year. Hospitals are the biggest revenue generator, contributing an average of 64 percent of a firm's total design fee income. Outpatient facilities, at a far distant second, typically contribute 12 percent of a firm's revenue. Understandably, bigger, better, brighter, and newer is the name of the health-care game: The majority (62 percent) of these projects are new construction whereas 38 percent are renovations. In an industry where success can literally be a matter of life or death, new technologies—and the space to accommodate them—are often crucial to currency. In these cases, sustainability needs to be built-in from the ground up.

See the 2007 Healthcare Giants.
See the full Interior Design Giants rankings.