Designing with Art: How We Curated Original Works for a Seattle Orthodontist Office

Art That Makes You Want to Smile: Curating Avenue Ortho

There’s a particular challenge in designing for a healthcare environment: how do you make a space feel genuinely welcoming — not just inoffensive — when the very nature of the visit can make people tense? This is where commercial art consulting Seattle services can make a real difference. At Avenue Ortho, the answer was art. And not just art as wallpaper. Art chosen with intention, installed with care, and selected to make every patient — from nervous first-timers to seasoned regulars — feel like they’ve walked into somewhere worth being.

We had the pleasure of curating the collection for this beautiful orthodontics practice, placing works by four Pacific Northwest artists throughout the space. Here’s a look at how it came together.

Setting the Tone in the Reception Area

The first thing you see when you walk into Avenue Ortho sets everything. The reception area needed to feel calm and considered — a signal that this is a practice that pays attention to the details. We placed “Salish Sea” by Brooke Fitts here, a sweeping horizontal work that hangs above a warm wood credenza. The image is all deep movement and quiet light — water caught at that moment between stillness and surge. It doesn’t demand anything of you. It just invites you to breathe.

The effect is immediate. You feel the care in the space before anyone has said a word.

Color as Conversation

Step into the individual treatment rooms and the palette shifts. The practice had made a bold choice with their furnishings — golden-yellow dental chairs that could easily have felt clinical or mismatched. Instead, they became the anchor for one of the most cohesive rooms in the project.

We placed two large-format vertical works by Chandra Sandoval here: close-up floral photographs so tightly cropped that the subject dissolves into pure form and color. The golden petals move between amber, saffron, and pale cream — mirroring the chairs below with an almost uncanny precision that feels anything but accidental. Patients recline under art that feels like it was made for the room. In a sense, the selection process ensures that it was.

The Open Bay: Where Energy Lives

The open treatment bay is where the design story really comes alive. Multiple yellow chairs, deep navy cabinetry, pendant lights, and polished concrete floors — it’s a space with a lot going on, and it needed art that could hold its own.

Eric Fanson’s abstract work here does exactly that. A richly layered painting in golds, ochres, and whites, it reads as warmth and movement — energetic enough to feel at home among the activity of the bay, refined enough to elevate rather than compete. The navy cabinetry grounds everything, and the painting floats above it all like the sun breaking through.

A Work That Stops You

In another treatment area, we installed a large horizontal piece by Paul Edmondson that consistently draws a second look. The work has the quality of something ancient made new — layers of color and texture that suggest aged timber, worn tile, or weathered earth, depending on where you stand and how the light falls. In tones of sage, moss, terracotta, and cream, it’s deeply tactile even from across the room.

Why Art Belongs in Healthcare

We believe strongly that art in medical and dental spaces isn’t a luxury — it’s a design decision with real impact. Research consistently shows that thoughtfully chosen art reduces patient anxiety, supports staff wellbeing, and communicates the values of a practice more clearly than almost any other element of the environment.

Avenue Ortho understood this from the start. The result is a practice that feels like a place people are genuinely glad to be at — a space where the art is doing real work, even when no one is consciously thinking about it.

Interested in bringing original art into your commercial or healthcare space? Contact us to learn more about our commercial art consulting services.