2025 dvm360 Hospital Design winner: Sherwood Family Pet Clinic

Robert Merrill, DVM, wanted to be a practice owner from the moment he graduated from veterinary school. However, only being 23 years old at the time, he would go on to work for 15 years in the industry before opening Sherwood Family Pet Clinic in 1996. Now Sherwood Family Pet Clinic in Oregon has moved to its new hospital close to where it first started.

Taking team input

In its new home, Sherwood Family Pet Clinic features a bright and efficient layout and had help from the entire team in designing the new location. “I think the thing I like the most is [that] the general feel of the hospital is bright. It’s light, and it’s the efficiency of the layout, so we purposefully put the doctors’ offices and the manager’s office centrally located between the examination rooms and the treatment room. We wanted to decrease the number of steps you had to take going back and forth between the treatment room and so forth,” Merrill told dvm360.

Overall, layout was important to Merrill. “One little thing is we put the laundry room off the treatment room, because that’s where most [of] the laundry is created,” he said.

Although the hospital was designed in a way that works best for the staff, clients, and patients, it still had its issues. Merrill explained one of
the most difficult things for them was finding the property that was best for them, but after years of looking, he finally found it 4 blocks down the street from where their hospital originally operated.

Applying design features

Throughout the process, Merrill would look
at other hospitals and consider current trends
in the designs to see whether they would work for him. He shared that he would also look through previous winners of dvm360’s Hospital Design360 Competition and see what design features he would like to implement or ones that he could do without. For example, he shared that in the design process, it was suggested that they install kiosks instead of a larger desk area for checking clients in and out of the clinic.

After discussing the plans among themselves and Merrill thinking about a friend of his who designed a hospital with a smaller front desk,
the team realized they needed a bigger front desk instead of kiosks because they would not work for his practice. Clients were coming in and out of the clinic for different things, so it was important to have that larger central location. Plus, to Merrill, sometimes a fad is not the best long-term option for your clinic.

Considerations for hospital building

For anyone interested in building their hospital, Merrill offered this advice: “It’s a process that’s generally longer than you expect it will be, so it’s good to understand that’s going to be the case. If you’re upping your lease to stay in your current space, you probably want to give yourself more time than [what] your contractors [are] telling you, because they might say the building is going to be done on such and such a day [and] I had to add 6 months onto that. So luckily, we were renting a property in the leasehold—the lease- hold improvement for the mall. It was time for me to redo my leads, and they insisted on at least 2 years. And I said, “I don’t need 2 years,” but they wouldn’t budge. As it turned out, I needed every last month to get out of that space. I got lucky there that we didn’t have, at least, termination too soon. So that’s one bit of advice.”

“I would shop hard for your loan, because there are lots of fees and you want to have a banker you trust and [who] knows you. So we’ve dealt with lots of bankers over the years, but that’s important,” he continued.

To conclude, when asked what he is most proud of when it comes to this award and Sherwood Family Pet Clinic, Merrill told dvm360 that he is most proud of his team of veterinarians and staff at the hospital. Without them, Merrill said, the business would not have grown and prospered enough to the point where they would need a new building.