We teamed up with Cassin & Sons to design and document the Animal Referral Hospital, an advanced facility that balances clinical precision with a calm, welcoming feel.

The situation

Animal Referral Hospital ran a specialist veterinary service out of a facility they had outgrown. They needed room to treat more animals and to deliver the service properly. The building they took at Homebush had good bones and needed work to bring it back to its former glory.

The pressure point

The lease on the existing premises had an expiry date, and that date set everything else. The new facility had to be designed, documented and built before the old one ran out. A specialist animal hospital is not a simple fitout. Surgical suites, anaesthetic gas reticulation, imaging, recovery and isolation each carry their own servicing and separation requirements, and all of it had to be threaded through a building that already existed.

The specific risks:

• Services clashes discovered on site rather than on paper, each one costing days there were none of
• A plan that works as a drawing but pushes animals, staff and owners through the same corridor
• An existing structure that does not give up what is behind it until it is opened up
• A fixed end date with no room to extend

The call that mattered

The obvious move with a lease clock running is to get the drawings out fast, tender them, and let the builder resolve the coordination on site. That is how most fitouts on a deadline are run. It is also how they blow out, because every clash found on site is a decision made under time pressure by whoever is standing there.

We did not run it that way. Cassin & Sons came in alongside the design rather than after it, and the project was run as one collaboration between builder, architect and owner from the start. Buildability and cost were being tested while the decisions were still cheap to change.

That let two things be resolved on paper. The first was services coordination, which on a facility like this is most of the job. Medical gases, imaging, ventilation, drainage and power all had to be set against each other, and against the existing structure, before anything was cut.

The second was flow. The plan was built around how animals actually move through the facility: arrival, consultation, imaging, surgery, recovery, discharge. That sequence decides where the walls go, and where the walls go decides where the services run. Getting the order right meant the building was designed once rather than corrected twice.

Where it landed

The facility was delivered on time and on budget, into the lease window rather than past it. Animal Referral Hospital moved out of a space they had outgrown and into a building set up around the way they actually work, from the reception counter through to the treatment and recovery areas.

Animal Referral Hospital, Homebush

A lease running out. A service that had outgrown its space. An existing building that needed bringing back. A facility where the services are the hard part. The risk was drawing it fast and finding the clashes on site.

If you’ve got a lease clock running and a space that has to do more than it currently does, that’s where we start. Book a 15-minute call.