De Villa – Day-care centre with housing

The ’s Heeren Loo care centre provides relatively small-scale housing and care facilities in residential areas. This facilitates the integration of people with a mental disability in the community. In addition to the highly-specific requirements for care functions, this also requires high-quality provisions regarding spatial blending in, scale, the materials used and the detailing of a building. The location on Zutphensestraat in Apeldoorn offers a daytime activities programme for forty-six clients. They have a work place in the candle-making shop or in the soap studio or participate in sensory therapy in the special aroma and colour room. The centre has sixteen flats where teenagers with a mental disability can live under supervision.

The conflicting wish to create a single, integral building with separate entrances for the permanent residents and the visitors to the day-care centre has been carried through with the utmost consistency. The stepped, brickwork frontage creates space for an inviting entrance for the daytime activities. The convex façade with timber verandas accesses all the housing at the rear of the building, creating a special connection between each apartment and the collective park-like garden.