Supporting Firefighter Wellness Through Design
It has been well documented that firefighters are at a higher risk of mental health issues than the general population. While awareness has increased dramatically over the last decade, with multiple hotlines and outreach programs now available, studies show too many firefighters mask their mental health challenges until it’s too late. While the increase in the number of psychological injuries reported to TCFP since 2018 does demonstrate progress, a 2023 study indicates that the presence of common noticeable indicators of suicidal thinking is much lower for first responders, indicating they mask their feelings better than most, which compounds the difficulty in acknowledging and addressing stress symptoms directly. This leads us to the topic of addressing these symptoms indirectly.
Considering firefighters can spend as much as one-third of their service at the firehouse, the importance of the quality of their home away from home cannot be overlooked and must be considered as a strategic tool in the search for wellness.
With this in mind, a survey about recovery spaces was conducted by BRW Architects in early 2025. While municipal leadership usually plan fire stations as primarily operational municipal buildings, this survey suggests they also function as recovery environments after difficult calls. For architects, that means layout affects more than efficiency and durability; it also shapes informal peer support, emotional reset, and short-term restoration. Across 151 respondents in eight departments, the most valued post-call spaces were not isolated, dedicated decompression rooms but shared daily-use areas such as kitchens, dining rooms, and dayrooms.
The rooms most associated with decompression are the spaces where crews already gather, eat, and spend unstructured time together. In effect, the kitchen and dayroom may operate as behavioral-health infrastructure. Rather than treating them as secondary amenities, designers should see them as high-value social spaces where size, comfort, acoustics, seating, visibility, and adjacency influence how easily post-incident support can happen.
When images of these preferred gathering spaces were analyzed, a clear preference for lower ceilings over exposed structure or double height spaces was noted, as well as more intimate, residential type gathering spaces over grand, open commercial spaces. In short, spaces of communal refuge were preferred over spaces of communal exposure.
The data does not support a broad claim that first responders prefer isolation after traumatic calls. Retreat-oriented responses accounted for 18.5% of the sample and showed no meaningful linear relationship with number of years served. For design practice, the implication is not communal space versus privacy, but a gradient of settings for different recovery modes. Bunk rooms, offices, showers, quiet corners, and outdoor areas can all serve as short-term retreat spaces for users who need reduced stimulation to gather their thoughts before rejoining the group.
The department-level leadership pattern reinforces this spatial reading. Departments with more positive leadership-support comments also tended to report higher well-being, suggesting that space and culture work together. A well-designed kitchen, dayroom, or decompression area cannot replace organizational support, but it can reinforce or undermine it. Post-call recovery is therefore a socio-spatial condition shaped by encounter, privacy, and the ease of moving between operational and restorative zones.
The clearest design implication is that fire stations should be planned as layered environments, not collections of isolated rooms. Shared crew spaces should be durable and efficient, but also comfortable enough to support decompression without formal programming.
Semi-private transition zones can bridge active work areas and quieter interiors, while private retreat options should remain available without being stigmatized or cut off from station life. For architects, the lesson is simple: recovery depends on hierarchy, adjacency, acoustic and lighting control, personalization, and choice.
The study is self-reported and exploratory, so its limits matter: the well-being items are not clinical measures, some room responses were ambiguous, department sample sizes were uneven, and correlation does not establish causation. Even so, the results offer a useful design insight. Fire station planning can either support or frustrate the informal social architecture of recovery, and both communal support space and legitimate retreat space deserve deliberate attention.
