Regis Palm Beach is a 170-bed residential aged care facility planned to be situated on the Palm Beach ocean front. The building is a combination of traditional aged care and supported living accommodation, with extensive communal facilities and external recreation spaces at all levels. Our client, Regis Aged Care, sought a building in tune with the relaxed beachside culture of Palm Beach, offering an opportunity for Gold Coast residents to age-in-place within their community. The design develops an architectural language to mediate between the civic nature and institutional scale of the programme with the residential scale and relaxed, coastal lifestyle of the Palm Beach context. The building comprises a heavily articulated 7-storey volume with a smaller 3-storey volume over, separated by a storey of recreational spaces and gardens. The built form is softened with extensive planting at all levels, providing significant visual amenity for neighbours and residents. A palette of fine-grain and crafted materials, including bronze metal screening, bright feature colours, and brickwork further soften and warm the building. Light-coloured, textured brickwork creates subtle Palm Tree supergraphics on the building which evoke the Gold Coast’s ‘sub-tropical modern’ vernacular and the classic large-scale motel signage along the highway. The expression of each façade is finely tuned to negotiate sun shading, aspect, view, privacy and overlooking. Saw-tooth tapering to the north and south facades affords all residents a view of the ocean from their bed, with angled screening and climbing plants providing solar shading and privacy. Extensive planted screening protects the Western, highway-facing façade, whilst the eastern facades open up to ocean views. At ground floor, a Porte Cochere allows residents and visitors to be dropped-off and picked-up from the building, protected from the weather. The foyer links the street front to the ocean with a series of communal, gathering and café spaces. On the residential levels, extensive internal and landscaped external communal areas offer views of the ocean and opportunities to appreciate the Gold Coast climate. Regis Palm Beach provides a relaxed, welcoming set of indoor and outdoor spaces that improve residents’ quality and offers a model for scaling up coastal architecture.