Riverside University Health System Wellness Village

The project is the landmark proof of concept for California's Behavioral Health Continuum Infrastructure Program (BCHIP), and even a project of this size will not come close to meeting regional needs. What happens here will shape how California—and potentially the country—thinks about behavioral health infrastructure.

Dignity by design

If there is a single idea at the heart of the Wellness Village's design, it is this: people in their most vulnerable moments deserve the most thoughtfully considered environments. Not serviceable. Not adequate. Exceptional.

The design team spent time walking RUHS's existing facilities throughout the design process. The stark contrast was clarifying. This project would not settle. The result is a campus that visitors—including operators from other large behavioral health systems in Southern California—describe with surprise. The finishes are warm. The daylighting is intentional. Broad roof lines shelter outdoor gathering spaces. Interior wood tones were selected to match exterior wood-look EIFS in grain, pattern, and color so precisely that the inside and outside feel continuous—not because it was easy, but because the team insisted the submittals deliver it.

Interior design lead Carissa Nook approached the buildings with a specific question: not what behavioral health spaces typically look like, but what it would feel like to have genuine personality—the kind of character you find in a space that was designed for you, not for a category you've been assigned to. Color, warmth, and a sense of belonging. A place that communicates, before a single word is spoken, that you are welcome and that your presence here matters.

The MHRC—the Mental Health Rehabilitation Center, a locked, high-acuity treatment building—is perhaps the clearest expression of this philosophy. It is secured and clinically intensive. It is also filled with natural light, interior courtyards, residential-style finishes, and calming materials that communicate care rather than confinement, while thoughtfully addressing safety and operational needs. For residents with histories of institutionalization, this distinction is not cosmetic. It is clinical.

The design team also thought carefully about time. This campus will serve Mead Valley for decades without major renovation. The strategy: build in permanence where it counts—architectural forms, materials, fixed finishes—and build in adaptability where change is likely, through furniture, fabrics, graphics, and paint. The result is a campus that can evolve with RUHS without losing its identity.

A new model of care

The Wellness Village does not treat behavioral health as a single condition with a single intervention. It treats it as a spectrum of human experience and the design embraces the full journey from crisis to community.

The campus is organized as a progression of programs, moving from acute crisis care at one end to supported independent living at the other. Outdoor spaces connect each program together, and those spaces are not simply connective tissue, but are programmed around the nature of the care happening beside them. As a patient moves through programs, they move through the campus. They pass through an orchard and engage with different outdoor environments. Their path through the site mirrors their path through recovery.

What the campus contains

The Village's five buildings house programs that are, in several cases, the first of their kind in California or in the county:

What makes this more than a list of programs is the intentional ecology connecting them. RUHS leadership speaks frequently of removing barriers: the pet that prevents someone from seeking care, the food desert that makes healthy eating impossible, the lack of stable housing that undermines recovery. Each program on campus addresses a documented barrier. Together, they make the healthy choice the easy choice.

Community integration and destigmatization

The Wellness Village is not a facility the community must accept, but a destination the community is invited into.

Building 2, the Wellness and Education Center, sits at the campus perimeter and is fully open to the public. The market serves anyone, and was intentionally included in the project to benefit the surrounding community as well as Village residents. The cafe welcomes family members visiting loved ones in programs, so a parent can have lunch with their child on campus and then return. Community gatherings and educational events can be hosted here. The outdoor spaces are designed for both therapeutic use and community engagement.

The design team understood from the outset that the campus would only succeed if it became part of Mead Valley's civic life, not something set apart from it. A campus that draws people in, that provides real resources (fresh groceries, a place to gather, sports courts), changes the community's relationship with behavioral health care. It signals that these services, and the people who use them, belong here.

The RUHS team described this as destigmatization through design. When the built environment communicates respect, welcome, and permanence, it changes who feels comfortable seeking care—and how the broader community thinks about the people who do.

How it was delivered

The Wellness Village is BA's largest project to date, and its delivery is itself a story worth telling.

The project launched at unusual speed. RUHS expected six months to receive state BCHIP funding approval; they received it in three weeks. The team began concept design before contracts had even begun.

The urgency was real: the county needed this, and everyone involved knew it. The project utilized a progressive design-build delivery, with Snyder Langston as general contractor. But the partnership went further than typical design-build integration. At the transition to construction, BA's MEP design firm (P2S Engineering) was contracted directly under the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing subcontractors—meaning the engineers who designed the systems worked alongside the people installing them. Design intent was not handed off. It was carried through.

At the project's peak, BA's project lead Mila Volkova was coordinating a record amount of design team members simultaneously, alongside consultants, the GC, the developer, and the client. The project required developing new internal processes for managing construction administration at this scale—processes that have since been adopted on other BA projects.

The campus also ended up moving locations during the design phase, presenting immense challenges for project stakeholders. The original site had infrastructure limitations that forced a full relocation mid-design. The new site proved to be better: a longer linear geometry without the carve-outs that complicated the first site, and one that allowed the progression of programs from one end of campus to the other to emerge more clearly. What could have been a setback became an improvement.

Four organizations—BA, RUHS, PMB, and Snyder Langston—have operated as genuine equal partners throughout. The culture that resulted was visible at every level: the RUHS team described seeing the same mission-driven engagement in the drywall crews as in the design meetings. When the client toured Building 3 late in construction, Rhyan Miller sent an email to the project team that read, simply: "Building 3 is amazing. So impressed each day with the things I see."

Looking ahead

The Wellness Village is scheduled to open in late 2026, with a ribbon cutting scheduled in December. The governor's office has been engaged. The campus will open to significant attention—and the team is prepared.

The campus was designed to be replicated—or at least to make replication easier to imagine. BCHIP funding, the model that made this possible in California, will not exist indefinitely. The argument this campus makes is that this is worth the investment.