Zacharia Lester leads our healthcare design team at Hummel. With over 28 years of experience, Zach is a seasoned design professional who has touched well over 100 projects throughout his career. Since joining Hummel eight years ago, Zach has brought our healthcare design to new heights through his expert guidance, technical knowledge, and valuable mentorship. Zach brings to Hummel an extensive resume of designing hospitals, surgery centers, and medical office projects. He specializes in healthcare programming, medical planning, life safety, and FGI codes, and excels in finding clients creative solutions of higher quality and great value.

As a native Idahoan, Zach is deeply committed to promoting healthy living and increasing access to essential medical services across Idaho and beyond. By contributing to the design team that delivers essential healthcare facilities, he plays a slight but meaningful role in making our communities more livable. His dedication fuels his collaboration with leading healthcare institutions in Idaho, where he works closely with their talented medical staff to design everything from small medical clinics to expansive hospital campuses. Additionally, Zach is committed to supporting the development of our healthcare workforce through partnerships with top higher education institutions. He’s worked with colleges and universities, including Idaho State University and Treasure Valley Community College, College of Southern Idaho, and Carrington College, to create healthcare workforce training and nursing facilities that provide high-quality, hands-on learning environments for their healthcare programs.

What originally brought you to Hummel?

Hummel is renowned for its legacy and history in Idaho, and we are a prominent name in architecture both in the state and the region. With an impressive roster of longstanding, high-quality clients, I knew it would be exciting to be part of this team. It’s also a privilege to work alongside such a talented group of professionals and collaborate with them daily.

What is your approach to mentorship, especially as it relates to younger staff?

I believe a designer contributes three key elements to a team or project: talent, skills, and experience. Cultivating each of these is crucial for a designer’s growth over their career. Experience typically develops as projects come in and staff members are assigned roles. However, as a leader within the firm and on project teams, I have the opportunity to help guide employees in gaining new skills and coach them in honing those skills.

I believe in providing our team with hands-on problem-solving opportunities because I think the most effective learning happens through direct experience—at least, that’s how I personally developed and maintained my technical design skills. As for talent, I see it as something innate, something special that an individual naturally possesses. But I also believe that by gaining experience and developing skills, more of that hidden talent emerges.

When it comes to professional development, I focus on giving my colleagues the chance to tackle tough challenges as part of a team and involve them in meaningful work. I strategically staff projects with employees’ long-term goals in mind, aligning these with the firm’s goal of nurturing and growing our team members. Being involved in significant projects can be like working on another thesis or even earning an additional degree. Complex projects have the power to expand an individual’s capabilities, helping them grow tremendously and become capable of far more than they were before the project.

It’s been incredibly rewarding to mentor my Hummel team members over the years and witness their growth. Our healthcare team, in particular, has expanded to over a dozen staff members who have become highly capable and specialized in a wide range of healthcare project types and departments. They are well-versed in the unique challenges of healthcare facilities, including the heavy use of medical equipment, the building’s engineering system infrastructure, and the stringent healthcare and life safety code requirements.

Over the past decade, our team members have played key roles in designing and constructing several significant, complex projects for multiple clients at Hummel. We now have a deep bench of healthcare architects and interior designers, which has enhanced our ability to support a larger volume of projects for an expanding number of healthcare clients. It’s truly an exciting time for us!

A lot of your projects over your career have been in healthcare, why do you like working on those types of projects and for those types of clients?

I like doing healthcare design because it is a very complex and difficult project type. Healthcare projects are highly challenging due to their sophisticated programs, heavy engineering building infrastructure, extensive amount of medical equipment, and  all the life safety code requirements that must be navigated in designing and building these projects.

What makes it truly special for me is the opportunity to help build these facilities in our local communities and contribute to the long-term impact they have. I’ve seen firsthand how these completed facilities support and enhance the well-being of the communities they serve, and being part of that is a significant achievement.

For example, my work in rural healthcare has shown me the important role these facilities play in making a community livable, particularly when it comes to critical access hospitals in smaller towns. While our region is beautiful and offers plenty of resources, essential services like good schools, grocery stores, and healthcare facilities are crucial to the people who live there. Without them, living in some of these places can be challenging, especially if people have to travel long distances for care.  A well-designed healthcare facility not only provides vital services for those who live there but also attracts talented nurses, doctors, and providers, which makes a significant difference to the patients.

We recently completed a new hospital expansion/renovation in McCall, Idaho. The first phase involved an addition that essentially replaced the old facility, and now we’re working on renovating the original part. This new project has brought more space to administer additional services,  treatments, and diagnostics, as well as more exam spaces to better serve the community. The hospital now has four operating rooms, up from just two, and has moved from shared patient rooms to all individual private rooms. It’s now a modern facility with state-of-the-art technology and infrastructure. The new hospital addition includes an expanded Emergency Department with nine bays, including two trauma bays, a Bariatric bay, and a secure isolation bay as well as a a new adjacent infusion department which doubles as ER overflow if needed.

These improvements increase the hospital’s capacity, meaning more treatment opportunities and less need for patients to travel elsewhere. The new facility also enhances the hospital’s ability to recruit and retain essential healthcare professionals, ensuring availability and access to care. Patients no longer need to wait for a specialist to visit or travel long distances for specialized care.

Additionally in McCall, we’ve also recently designed a new urgent care clinic at the Allen Nokes Clinic building across the street from the hospital. Now, community members have a local urgent care clinic and can see a provider as late as 8 PM without having to travel far, visit the emergency room, wait until the next day, or wait until after the weekend to see a provider. This is a tremendous benefit for the community. 

Looking ahead, what excites you about the future of Hummel?

When I look at our current projects, the recently completed ones, and the outlook for future projects, I see a roster filled with high-quality work and exceptional clients. It’s exciting to witness what my colleagues are accomplishing and have the opportunity to lead and be a part of such a talented team.

Since joining, I’ve been particularly focused on delivering healthcare projects and building a strong, dedicated team of healthcare design professionals. I’m proud to say that our team has now grown to over a dozen members, each with impressive capabilities and expertise. It’s really incredible to reflect on the fact that over the past ten years, we’ve designed over a million square feet of healthcare facilities, with more than 750,000 square feet of that space already constructed. As a result, we now have a highly skilled team ready to support future healthcare projects.

Our achievements over the last decade include the construction of 20 operating rooms, 70 pre/post PACU bays, and more than three dozen imaging spaces—covering modalities such as MRIs, X-rays, CT scans, DEXA, ultrasound, and mammography. And that’s just within our recently constructed radiology and surgery portfolio. Additionally, our team has built several hundred exam rooms across multiple clinics for various clients throughout the state.

I’m incredibly proud of our team and excited about their potential. My goal is to continue mentoring them so they can confidently lead and participate in these projects independently. I have full confidence in their abilities. To me, it’s all about recognizing the strength of our healthcare team, appreciating how far they’ve come, and celebrating the specialized work they’ve accomplished over the past decade.