Northlake Behavioral Health Systems (NBHS) Facility was originally established in 1948 as the Southeast Louisiana State Hospital. Since then its’ services, programs, and name have changed and morphed, while the 1950’s style facility itself has remained in its roughly 200 acre tranquil setting.
NBHS is in the Parish of St. Tammany and the City Mandeville,
Louisiana in the southeast quadrant of the state. It sits in the
metropolitan region of New Orleans about 45 mile north of the city’s downtown core. Across the street from the NBHS is the State’s 2,800ac Fontainebleau Park listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
NBHS has been working over the past few years to create a nurturing and caring environment for those in need of behavioral health
treatment. While expanding their services and programs to meet the needs of the regions’ behavioral health requirements, they have
decided to restore one of the campus’ vacant buildings- the Choctaw
Building- into an Acute Care Patient Unit. The maximum stay for
residents will be fourteen days.
The building shell and interior walls can accommodate the required program for an acute care unit with a few practical and aesthetic
upgrades. The design challenge for the students of LSU’s Interior Design Program is to restore the building to an aesthetic that fosters healing and recovery in a home-like environment while upgrading hardware, furniture, fixtures, finishes, and equipment to ligature-free standards. A unique opportunity for the project is to design the outdoor spaces
adjacent to the Choctaw Building as “healing gardens” that, together with the indoor spaces, offer an extended and interconnected network of spatial environments for improving recovery, health and wellbeing.