An 18,000- square-foot triangle building capped with weathered steel and lighted by the rays of the sun is a far cry from veterinarian Todd Tobias’ first work space - the backseat of a Mazda sedan. For a year, Tobias (age 48) was a mobile vet “and I hated it,” he said. Even after he moved into a real office in a Cordova strip mall, he longed for something more fitting, for himself, for his employees and for his patients. He also wanted state-of-the-art architecture to reflect the state-of-the-art veterinary medicine his practice offered. In June, Memphis Veterinary Specialists moved into just such a space designed by Memphis-based archimania.

“I didn’t want something blah,” Tobias said as he stood on easy-to-clean, non-slip flooring in the spacious, modern lobby filled with natural light from a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. “The architecture needed to help tell our story. I wanted people to think, ‘I’m in the right spot. This is where I needed to be.’ I wanted them to be impacted in some way.”

To find a practice like Memphis Veterinary Specialists at 555 Trinity Creek, you’d probably have to travel to Starkville, Miss., or to Nashville. It’s the only veterinary specialist hospital in the region. Other veterinarians refer patients to the practice when they’ve done as much as they know to do. Specialties include surgery, internal medicine, oncology (cancer), ophthalmology (eye), dermatology and dentistry. Fourteen veterinarians see an average of 30 patients a day but sometimes as many as 50. While many are cats and dogs, birds are treated, too, and the occasional monkey is seen. After hours, the practice becomes an emergency veterinary clinic that treats animals from across the Mid-South. Tobias opened the practice with 3,200 square feet in 1997 at 830 N. Germantown Road. As the practice grew, he acquired additional units, eventually using 8,000 square feet of the strip mall. “It was very inefficient, the flow. It ended up being a maze,” Tobias said.

While working in the pieced-together space, he was thinking, planning. He had property on Trinity Creek. That’s where he could build a building that would suit the practice’s needs. He needed space for the CT scanner, oxygen cages, an operating room and patient rooms. He needed separate ventilation systems so germs wouldn’t spread between types of animals. He needed offices and a fully-furnished bedroom for the after-hours emergency vet, who was napping on a futon in a closet. During a vacation, Tobias drew up plans for the building, but he was a veterinarian surgeon, not an architect. He needed a professional. He discovered archimania, which has been selected for more American Institute of Architects awards than any firm in the state in the past 15 years.

“We like clients who have vision. We like to help shape it,” said Barry Alan Yoakum, an archimania architect who worked on the project. Putting together plans for a building that would be pleasing to the eye and had specialized functional needs was a challenge, but doable. Design took five to six months – less time than expected for a project this size because Tobias had laid the groundwork for what he needed. “We’ve never done a veterinary hospital like this … but what we’re really good at is problem solving,” said Todd Walker, an archimania founder and one of the project’s architects. “Bringing all these things together, problem solving and keeping it within budget - we really had a puzzle that needed to be solved.” Said architect Matt Seltzer: “They really went out of the way to collaborate with us. There were times we met three times a week.”

To fit a triangular-shaped lot with a sort of handle on the end, archimania proposed a perfectly triangular building. At one of the points, patients would filter into the lobby by passing under a long swatch of canopy, or porte cochere, created by the weathered steel. Two spaces would be open to the sky and be used as a dog run or courtyard.

Tobias’ favorite aspect of the $3.4 million building is its relationship to the outdoors. Floor-to-ceiling windows on the side of patient rooms expose visitors to a dense planting of trees and shrubs along a creek. A second-floor balcony on the same side gives employees in the break room a refreshing look of the outdoors. “The thing I adore the most is it backs up into foliage. I have lots of people come from fancy practices and they say, ‘Oh my God. We don’t have this,” Tobias said. “I’m thrilled. This was always my dream.”

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About archimania:
archimania specializes in rebranding medical practices, was founded in 1995 and has a portfolio of many architectural “firsts” including recently completing design of Tennessee’s first Zero Energy Building (ZEB).

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