Eigersund Municipality has signed Skanska to design and build the Langevann Healthcare Centre in Egersund, on Norway’s southwestern coast — a contract worth about NOK 320 million, roughly SEK 310 million, booked into Skanska’s Nordic order intake for the fourth quarter of 2026. It is a design-and-build agreement: one contractor responsible for both the drawings and the finished building, and one municipality putting most of its care services under a single new roof.
The building is approximately 8,000 square metres, and its programme is the story. A nursing home with 60 resident rooms. A day activity centre. A production kitchen. And additional premises for health and care services — four functions that in most municipalities live in separate, ageing buildings, consolidated into one purpose-built centre. The new centre will replace parts of the existing healthcare buildings on the site.
Consolidation is an operations decision before it is an architecture decision. Four services in one building means one plant to run instead of four: one heating and ventilation regime, one kitchen producing for residents and day visitors alike, one cleaning and maintenance round, one set of deliveries at one dock. The scattered alternative — a kitchen here, a day centre there, resident rooms in a third building — multiplies every one of those costs and puts staff in cars between sites. Eigersund is buying the single-roof version of its own care system.
The production kitchen is the consolidation made physical. A kitchen sized only for 60 resident rooms is a cost centre; a production kitchen inside a combined centre can feed the nursing home, serve the day activity centre, and anchor meal services beyond the building’s walls. Whether Eigersund uses it that way will be decided in the operating model, not the contract — but the building is being specified with the capacity to do it, and capacity specified at design stage is cheap. Capacity added later is a renovation.
Design-and-build puts the flexibility question in one pair of hands. The municipality’s stated aim is modern, flexible service delivery — rooms and treatment areas that can be reorganised as care needs change. In a design-and-build contract, that ambition survives or dies in the brief: standardised room sizes, structure and services that tolerate walls moving, and no bespoke fit-out that locks a room to one use for thirty years. The advantage of the model is that the builder pricing the building is the same party drawing it, so flexibility features get costed honestly at the moment they can still be kept.
The harder problem is that the site is not empty. The centre replaces parts of the existing healthcare buildings, which means construction proceeds alongside services that cannot pause — residents live in the old accommodation while the new one rises. Phasing, decanting, and keeping care running through a building programme is the unglamorous discipline that decides whether a project like this is remembered fondly. It is also where a 26-month programme earns its keep: construction starts in November 2026, with handover expected in January 2029.
That handover date deserves a facilities manager’s attention. A January completion in southwestern Norway means commissioning, systems handover, and first occupation in the middle of the heating season, with a new building’s plant meeting its first real winter load in the same weeks its operators are learning it. None of that is unusual — Nordic builders hand over buildings in winter routinely — but the operating team inherits the steepest part of the learning curve at the least forgiving time of year.
What Eigersund is really building is an answer to the arithmetic every small municipality faces: an ageing population, care standards that keep rising, and a building stock assembled in pieces over decades. Langevann’s answer is to stop maintaining the pieces. One building, one plant, one kitchen, sixty rooms — and a design brief that bets the next thirty years of care will not look exactly like the last thirty. The projects to compare it with are the replacement hospitals rising on greenfield sites, like AdventHealth’s new Louisville hospital — Langevann is the municipal, in-place version of the same decision: replace, consolidate, and build for the service you are becoming rather than the one the old walls assumed.
Source: Skanska press release, October 16, 2026. Contract value excludes VAT; construction November 2026 to January 2029.