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Late afternoon sun falling across a curved cream sofa and a jute rug in the waiting room at Sona Dental, with the street visible through tall Crittall glazing

Selected work · Commercial

Sona
Dental.

A dental practice on a high street, fitted out end to end. Fluted oak, green marble and ochre plaster, and a room to wait in that does not announce what happens next door. Shown here beside the visualisations it was designed from.

The brief

Make it not feel like a dentist.

Everything else came out of that one sentence. The waiting room took the best light in the building rather than the leftover corner. The reception desk got stone instead of laminate, because the first thing you touch sets what you expect from the rest. And the clinical rooms were left frankly clinical. Dressing those up is what makes people uneasy, not what settles them.

Visualisation of the reception: an unbroken run of fluted oak, an amber arched niche and a near-black marble desk

01 · Drawn

Reception

The desk in near-black marble under an amber niche, with the oak run carried unbroken behind it.

The reception as built: a pale green marble desk below two ochre arched niches, against fluted oak, lit by brass globe pendants

01 · Built

The stone arrived pale green instead of near-black, and the niche went ochre. The room came out warmer than the drawing asked for.

Visualisation of the same reception seen from the waiting side, over a herringbone floor, with a straight bench along the window

02 · Drawn

From the waiting side

Herringbone underfoot, and a straight bench running along the window wall.

The waiting room as built: a curved cream sofa on a round jute rug over plank flooring, the front door and street beyond

02 · Built

Plank instead of herringbone, and the bench became a curve. That is the change that mattered.

A straight bench sits people in a row facing whoever is opposite. A curve gives everyone somewhere to look that is not another patient. It costs the same and it is the only thing in the room doing a job the drawing had not thought of.

Visualisation of two pebble-shaped mirrors hung on plaster beside a fluted oak run, in raking evening light

03 · Drawn

Two mirrors

A pair of pebble mirrors on plaster, next to the fluted run, in raking evening light.

The two mirrors as built, hung on plaster beside the fluted oak and a green marble jamb

03 · Built

Built almost exactly as drawn, down to the pairing and the shape.

And this is the one place the drawing is still the better picture. The render gave itself a raking evening light; the wall faces a street and never gets it. A visualisation can choose its hour. A practice at nine on a Tuesday cannot.

04 · Drawn

The clinical rooms

Visualisation of a treatment room with a ring light below a slatted timber ceiling
Visualisation of a second treatment room, white tile below a slatted timber ceiling

Both drawn warm: a ring light, and a slatted timber ceiling carried through from the front of the building.

04 · Built

A treatment room as built, with sash windows on two sides and the chair in the corner
The second treatment room in use, white tile below the slatted timber ceiling

What happened

One of them kept the timber. The other got three sash windows instead, which no render had thought to promise.

The drawings of these two rooms are moodier than the rooms are. Renders light themselves; clinical rooms have to be bright enough to work in. That is the correct answer even though it makes the weaker photograph.

What it is made of

Green marble, oak, ochre plaster, brass. Four things, everywhere.

A patient sitting against the ochre arched niche, with the fluted oak run behind and the green marble return in the foreground

In use

The test of a waiting room is whether anyone minds waiting in it.

Reception staff at the green marble desk below the ochre arches
A patient arriving and being greeted at the reception desk
A clinician and a patient talking in a treatment room beside the windows

A practice, a studio, or one room of either

Commercial work starts the same way a house does. Email matt@mattsmithwood.com, or say what the room has to do and we will start there.

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