Corumbene is an attempt to engage with the social and spiritual reality of a particular place, the Derwent Valley, and use that as the creative basis of producing a building design. The building - its external form and the interior spaces - are symbolic of the images that people living in the Derwent Valley would naturally associate and identify with, especially as they grow old and enter nursing home.

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Inside traditional hospital corridors have been replaced with an internal world which tries to symbolically replicate the atmosphere of the environment of the Derwent Valley in the thirties. It has been designed to avoid all of the typical stereotyped nursing home illusions of caring. Although all the most modern facilities are provided, they are discretely camouflaged to provide a truly home like atmosphere. In Corumbene the normal nursing functions are located behind facades of miniature shops; the nurses station becoming a chemist shop, the treatment room a barbers shop, and the pan room has been designed to hide away behind closed doors.