A refurbishment is mostly made of small, unglamorous decisions. Which vinyl. Which white. Which light fitting, on which circuit. None of them feels like a clinical decision at the time.
But those choices quietly decide whether a resident can find their own bathroom at 2 am, whether the corridor reads as a path or a puzzle, and whether a dark doormat looks like a mat or a hole in the floor. Get them right, and the building does some of the care work by itself. Get them wrong, and staff spend the next decade compensating.
Here’s what the evidence points to, and what’s worth locking in before anything is ordered.
Start with the principles, not the paint chart.
Australia already has a well-established framework. The 10 Dementia Enabling Environment Principles come from the work of Professor Richard Fleming and Kirsty Bennett at the University of Wollongong, and Dementia Australia publishes them as the reference point for reviewing care environments and refurbishment projects.
Four of them do most of the heavy lifting in a lighting and finishes scope: unobtrusively reduce risks, allow people to see and be seen, reduce unhelpful stimulation, and create a familiar place. If a selection can’t be justified against at least one of those, it’s usually decoration.
The other reason to work from established dementia-friendly design principles rather than instinct is that the new Aged Care Act brought the strengthened Quality Standards into effect on 1 November 2025, and Standard 4 is The Environment. An assessor asking how your physical setting supports residents is a much easier conversation when your finishes schedule can answer it.
Light the room for the person living in it.
Eyes change with age. Lighting guidance commonly works on roughly double the illuminance at 75 compared with 25. A staff member in their 30s walking a corridor is simply not seeing the same room a resident is.
That reframes a few things:
- Even light beats bright light. The ageing eye adapts slowly between light levels, so a corridor with bright pools and dark gaps is harder to walk than a corridor that’s uniformly, moderately lit.
- Glare undoes good lux. Older eyes are glare-sensitive, so matte finishes and indirect or diffused fittings usually do more than higher wattage.
- Bathrooms need more than they get. Around 300 lux is the figure most often cited for bathrooms, with task lighting at the basin rather than one ceiling fitting casting a shadow over whoever is standing there.
- Day and night are different jobs. Bright daytime light supports the sleep and wake cycle, and low, warm night lighting lets someone find a toilet without being jolted fully awake.
That last point is an electrical decision made at rough-in. Circuits that allow a low night-time level, or sensor lighting on a path from bed to ensuite, are straightforward to design in and awkward to retrofit.
Natural light is the cheapest lux available. It’s worth checking what the window treatments and the planting outside are doing to it before adding fittings.
Contrast is directional.
This is where most well-meaning schemes go wrong, because “use high contrast” is only half the instruction.
Guidance from the Dementia Services Development Centre at the University of Stirling and from Dementia Australia supports strong tonal contrast between key elements, with a working figure of about a 30-point difference in Light Reflectance Value. LRV is a 0-to-100 measure of how much light a surface bounces back, and most manufacturers publish it.
But the same research supports the opposite rule for floors. A strong tonal jump between two adjoining floor finishes can be read as a step or a hole, which is enough to stop someone mid-corridor. So the guidance runs in two directions at once.
| Aim for a large LRV difference (around 30+ points) | Aim for a small LRV difference (under about 10 points) |
| Wall against floor | Bedroom carpet against ensuite vinyl |
| Door against the wall around it | Threshold and joining strips against the floor either side |
| Handrail against the wall behind it | Corridor floor against room floor |
| Toilet seat against the pan | Any border or band set into a floor |
| Crockery against the table | Adjacent floor materials generally |
A few related traps are worth naming because they come up in nearly every older home. Dark mats, dark threshold strips and bold floor borders can all read as changes in level. Shiny or polished floors can read as wet. Speckled, flecked or sparkly finishes can read as litter or dirt, or as though the floor is moving. None of these is unusual choices in a commercial flooring restoration, which is exactly why they need a second look.
The 30 that isn’t the other 30.
One clarification saves a lot of confusion. The 30-point LRV difference above is dementia design guidance. It is not the same test as the 30% minimum luminance contrast calculated under AS 1428.1 for specified elements such as doorways and tactile ground surface indicators.
Meeting the Standard where it applies doesn’t automatically deliver a dementia-friendly result, and a 30-point LRV difference isn’t a substitute for the compliance calculation. They’re separate tools. Use both, in their own places.
Wayfinding usually works better as landmarks than signage.
Signs assume someone is reading and interpreting. Landmarks don’t ask for that.
Older adults tend to rely more on recognisable features than on abstract cues, which is why line of sight does more than labelling. If a resident can see the toilet from their bed, the building has answered the question before it was asked. If that isn’t possible, a contrasting door with a clear view through to the pan is the next best thing.
Personal objects do the same job at the bedroom door. A memory box, a familiar photograph, something the person chose themselves, is recognised faster than a room number. It’s also a gentler thing to look for.
Door contrast is also a tool for directions. If you want people to find the doors, they should stand out from the wall. Doors residents don’t need, such as service cupboards, can be allowed to recede.
Bedrooms and ensuites
Most useful dementia-friendly room ideas are small and cumulative rather than dramatic.
- A dark toilet seat on a white pan for better visibility.
- Grab rails that contrast with the wall behind them rather than disappearing into it.
- A matte, single-tone floor carried through from bedroom to ensuite at a similar tone, with a joining strip that doesn’t announce itself.
- Lever taps that look like what they do.
- A clear view of a clock or a window, so the time of day is legible.
- Space for a resident’s own furniture and photographs, because familiarity is doing real work.
Decide these at the specification stage.
If you’re preparing a scope, these are the items worth putting in writing:
- Ask for LRV figures, not colour names. Two products called the same shade of grey can be 20 points apart. Request published LRVs at tender and check them against the batch supplied.
- Look at samples under the actual light. A selection made under a showroom’s lighting can behave differently in a corridor.
- Put blocking behind the lining now. Noggins or plywood where grab rails might go later cost almost nothing during a refurbishment and a great deal afterwards.
- Design the night circuit early. Low-level and sensor lighting is a rough-in decision.
- Stage the work around residents. Relocation, noise and dust affect people with dementia more than most, and the program matters as much as the selections.
Published dementia-friendly design guidelines are detailed and freely available, and most providers find the gap isn’t knowledge. It’s getting the detail into the specification before the order goes in.
Working through a scope
Dementia-friendly homes aren’t built out of one decision. They come from a lot of small ones made in the right order, which is why it helps to have the builder in the room while the selections are still on paper.
Mathiou Services works with residential aged care providers across Queensland and Northern NSW on painting, finishes and staged refurbishment in occupied facilities, where the work has to fit around residents rather than the other way around.
If you’re scoping a refurbishment and want to talk it through, get in touch or call 1300 363 423. We’re happy to look at a finishes schedule with you before anything is ordered.