Huntington Hospital Heart & Vascular Center
Pasadena, CA

Project Strategy

What does a healthy heart look like? A healthy heart leads to a healthy community and Huntington Memorial has lead that charge for 130 years. Our team was tasked to continue to deliver that promise for Huntington Memorial Hospital, voted one of the Nation’s Top 100 cardiac hospitals.
From the initial design build stage, we partnered with Mannington Commercial, Abbott Construction, and HDR architects to build the most state-of-the-art cardiology department on the West coast. Universal Metro worked diligently to build every budget item - from standard sheet vinyl installation to the use of premier butterfly cornered self-coving, complete with heat welded seams, washed wall lighting, and a 2” pour of Ardex self-leveling underlayment to meet the floor flatness and leveling requirements of advanced imaging equipment.
The department's state-of-the-art equipment was surrounded by flooring design elements which included solid homogenous sheet vinyl in five colors in the sterile areas and a warmer, wellness-focused palette heterogenous, wood-visual vinyls in the patient recovery areas. This project has already been awarded for their design and patient care efforts, and Universal Metro was honored to work on this $600,000 project for their team.

Unique Installation Challenge Strategy

In addition to the incredible self-coved and heat-welded butterfly corner designs, Universal Metro was tasked to install on time and budget throughout the pandemic in the state of California, where mandates changed the rules daily. Crew size were limited due to six-foot, social distancing rules, start and stops due to exposure to other trades with positive cases, quarantine needs that followed, etc. When providing heat welds and self coving at this level, skillsets are hard to come by, and these COVID-related measures made the job much tougher. To ensure safety and depth in our crew size, we were often forced to provide work off-hours and overnight when accessibility was less restrictive. Beyond the dynamics of the pandemic, the most unique challenge came when it was discovered that the elevations of the subfloor in the existing shell were 1 - 2 inches higher than specified, which meant a solution would be necessary to address 3 crucial operating rooms. With Universal Metro's Ardex LevelMaster Elite Installer certification, our team was tasked with finding and delivering a solution. Over the course of three weeks we reshot all the elevations with the HDR team, scrabbled and grinded the slab as much as 2" lower than we found it, and then poured a new, flat surface for the imaging equipment that required completely flat floors. We are proud of our team that accomplished all of this during the pandemic requirements of California.