Design work to begin on new $305 million Stony Brook Southampton Hospital

 The Southampton Hospital Association said architects have been hired to begin design work right after the new year on a planned $305 million relocation of Stony Brook Southampton Hospital.

The hospital plans to relocate from its current Meeting House Lane location to 15 acres on the Southampton campus of Stony Brook University by 2025.

Manhattan-based Rafael Viñoly Architects and Dallas-based HKS Architects were selected because they "have built community hospitals and academic medical centers and are keenly adept at solving cultural, technological and environmental concerns, as well as those of function, with unique and unprecedented solutions and inspired designs," said Ken Wright, chairman of the Southampton Hospital Association, which owns and maintains the buildings and real estate where the.hospital and many of its satellite services now operate. 

Stony Brook Medicine took over the hospital's operations from the SHA in 2017. Stony Brook Medicine and the 125-bed hospital announced a letter of intent to merge back in October 2012. The deal required multiple state regulatory approvals. Plans for the relocation of the hospital, which is about 90 years old, have been in the works since 2012.

Rafael Viñoly Architects' health care work includes the Penn Medicine complex in Philadelphia, the new Stanford Hospital at the Stanford University Medical Center in Stanford, California, and the University of Chicago Medicine Center, Center for Care and Discovery. 

HKS Architects' designs include Akron Children’s Hospital in Akron, Ohio, Mercy Hospital in Joplin, Missouri, and the Moncrief Cancer Institute in Fort Worth, Texas.

The new Southampton structure will dedicate more space for ambulatory care, said Robert S. Chaloner, chief administrative officer at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital and president of the SHA. 

"Our hospital was built decades ago, when people stayed at the hospital," Chaloner said. "That has changed dramatically."

He said there will be more advanced operating rooms, as well as private patient rooms.

Private rooms have "become the trend," Chaloner said. "No one wants a roommate and I can't blame them."

Chaloner added that the new building will help the hospital recruit and retain staff.

"It's hard to recruit talent out here, so we want people who work here to love it so much that they never want to change jobs," he said.

Stony Brook Southampton Hospital's operations include 1,200 employees, the recently opened Phillips Family Cancer Center, a Heart and Stroke Center, Breast Health Center, The Center for Advanced Wound Healing, and 32 satellite care centers throughout the South Fork of Long Island. 

Stony Brook Southampton also plans to open an emergency department in East Hampton in two to three years, Chaloner said.