Prioritizing Patients With New Orlean's Children's Hospital

PROJECT DETAILS Cost: $1.1 million | Build Time: 10 months | Size: 5 acres

Creating a peaceful space around a southern children’s hospital

Each landscape is different. Every small detail reflects the unique creativity and tastes of the designers, builders, maintainers, growers and clients. Dozens of vibrant colors can be featured in a blooming flower bed, intricate patterns and designs paved onto sidewalks or patios, even thousands of trees spread across many acres of property. No matter the feature, though, every outdoor space has a shared purpose to provide a better human experience. 

When Chase Mullin and his team started work on Children’s Hospital New Orleans, experience was one of their first priorities. They started working at the site nearly a decade ago. Then, in 2017, they became an integral piece of the hospital’s largest expansion project in its history. The $300 million investment redesigned infrastructure, technology and landscapes across the campus, which is well over 20 acres. The project added a 28-room cardiac intensive care unit, 12 operating rooms, 45 emergency rooms, an extended cancer center and space for updated medical equipment for MRIs and CT scans. New outdoor areas featured improved family housing units, playgrounds, gardens and green spaces. 

Developers set the project in motion in 2017. It didn’t wrap up until three years later, though, due to the complexity of the plans, pandemic challenges, material shortages, staffing issues and other factors facing the construction industry as a whole. In all, it took roughly 1,500 working days to complete the entire process. Mullin started the landscape overhaul in 2021. A separate group planned the architecture, and Mullin teams brought those plans to fruition. 

“It was a bit interesting to start planning a project of this magnitude pre-Covid,” says Chase. “It took extra work and a lot of collaboration with the landscape architect on the project. Luckily, we have a great relationship with their team and it was a lot of fun to work on this.

The scope of the landscape work involved site grading, planting, turf installation, drainage updates, fencing, outdoor furnishing replacement and laying an expansive interlocking concrete paver sidewalk network. The team paved 20,000 square feet of highly detailed walkways to connect the various hospital buildings. The unique designs supported the overall purpose of the hospital's outdoor space—to enhance the patient experience. 

“In any hospital, but especially a children’s hospital, we have to pay a lot of attention to patients and their families,” explains Chase. “We do anything we can to respect the families going in and out of the hospital and the challenges they are facing.”

Children’s Hospital New Orleans is one of several health care facilities that Mullin builds or maintains. Crews who work on these sites are trained to respond as people move through the property. They offer a “white glove experience,” meaning they work to be aware of people around them and minimize the disruption to their lives. This includes things like turning off machines when a pedestrian is around and walking away if people need space to think, pray or even just take a breath. 

“We are the front line,” says Chase. “Our crews and our work are the first part of the experience for our clients and their customers. We are one of the first things they come into contact with.”

Chase says the outdoor spaces at a hospital offer many things to patients, especially those dealing with life-altering events inside. Separation, distraction, clarity, even peace, can all be found through a little fresh air, a nice breeze and a shady tree.

“My family and I spent time at a different hospital in the area several years ago,” says Chase. “During those few days, I'd go on many walks or sit on little benches set near lush foliage. Getting out of the hospital and being in a little nature, especially in an urban area like uptown New Orleans, makes you feel like you’re somewhere else. Instead of white walls and beeps, there are trees, shrubs and grass. It’s comforting.”

His family also went through a similar experience at Children’s Hospital New Orleans years before its expansion. When Chase was a teenager, he had a major brain surgery and stayed in the hospital for about a week. The staff at the hospital saved his life, and he says this project will help them save many more. 

“It gave me chills to be a part of this,” Chase says. “Knowing that this quarter-billion-dollar expansion would really have a positive impact for all the patients and their families. Especially because I was one of those patients; my family was one of those families. It makes it all the more meaningful.”

The project wrapped up as the team planted roughly 100 specimen trees and more than 10,000 shrubs. They also installed about 2,500 cubic yards of new soil. Chase says these new plantings are needed in urban spaces like uptown New Orleans and will have a positive impact on the local environment—and hospital patients—for years to come.

ABOUT

Mullin is a comprehensive landscape design + build and maintenance firm that offers a wide range of professional landscape services from landscape architecture and site planning to comprehensive landscape construction and landscape maintenance. For Mullin, exceptional service starts with passion. It’s an indecipherable and inherent desire to not just do, but to do with the discipline and drive to do more, time and time again. It’s this consistency, this cycle of exceptional service, that sets their team apart. As true landscape consultants, Mullin’s job is not just to design, build and maintain. It’s to follow through on that promise with the highest level of professionalism and reliability to create transformational results. Every job. Every time.