Commercial Design
Blackwell & Jennings is a commercial interior design studio in Raleigh, North Carolina, specializing in trauma-informed design for healthcare and wellness spaces across the Southeast.
For eight years, founder and lead designer Heather Jennings has designed for the moment a patient walks in: waiting rooms, therapy spaces, clinics, and behavioral health facilities, each one built on what the nervous system needs from light, color, material, and space.
What the Studio Designs
Clients include health systems, behavioral health organizations, federally funded facilities, and affordable housing developers. Recent and current work spans public health waiting rooms and therapy spaces, dental offices, dermatology and aesthetics practices, low-income housing communities, and reproductive health clinics, including nearly a dozen Planned Parenthood locations across the South. The studio's Planned Parenthood project in Charlotte earned Rethinking the Future's Architecture, Construction & Design Award for Interiors, Healthcare and Wellness.
Art, Made for the Space
Blackwell & Jennings is unique as the designer is also a working artist. Wherever a project allows, original art enters the space, commissioned or created for the specific people who will heal, work, and wait there. In a recent public health project, a custom mural by a local artist of color anchored a trauma-informed palette, art and design built from a single intention. Blackwell & Jennings weighs that opportunity on every project, from the first conversation.
Why Trauma-Informed Design
A waiting room is the first thing a patient reads. Before any chart, before any conversation, the room itself tells them whether they are safe. Trauma-informed design directs that first impression toward safety, dignity, and regulation, in the color on the wall, the fall of light, the path a patient walks from the door to the front desk. The commitment holds whether the project is a behavioral health facility or a dental exam room.
Let's Talk
Building or renovating a healthcare, wellness, or community space? Blackwell & Jennings would love to hear about the project.