The first thing many people notice when they enter Montage Health’s Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula is what they do not expect to find in a hospital.
A fountain bubbles beneath a soaring glass dome. Sunlight filters through towering pines. Original artwork fills the walls. A guitarist, harpist, pianist, ensemble, or vocalist may be performing live music nearby. These experiences are part of a vision that has shaped Montage Health for most of its 92-year local history.
Long before "healing environments" became a recognized field of study, Community Hospital leaders envisioned a hospital where nature, art, architecture, and music worked together to ease stress and support healing. Today, that vision continues through Montage Health's Arts in Health program, creating an experience unlike any other healthcare organization.
A creative vision rooted in healing
The story begins with Maurine Church Coburn. A philanthropist, arts advocate, founding board member of Community Hospital, and wife of Samuel F.B. Morse, who donated the land on which Community Hospital was built, Coburn helped shape the hospital's identity from the beginning. Working alongside Community Hospital's first CEO, Tom Tonkin, she championed the visionary idea that a hospital should care for the human spirit as thoughtfully as it cares for the body.
Coburn helped guide the selection of acclaimed architect Edward Durell Stone, whose design embraced natural light, private patient rooms, courtyards, skylights, expansive windows, and seamless connections to the surrounding Del Monte Forest. At a time when many hospitals were becoming larger, more institutional, and increasingly disconnected from nature, Community Hospital took a different path.
Today, the Maurine Church Coburn endowment continues that legacy by funding Montage Health's Arts in Health program, including visual art, live therapeutic music, and the landscaping that connects people to the natural beauty of the Monterey Peninsula.
"Art, music, and nature help people feel human in a place where they may experience fear, uncertainty, or stress," says Elizabeth Harbaugh, Arts in Health program manager. "They create moments of comfort, connection, and calm."
The Arts in Health program inspires those moments throughout Montage Health's facilities every day, and every piece of art, musical note, and carefully cultivated landscape is made possible by generous community donations through Montage Health Foundation.
Art collections curated with purpose
Thousands of works are displayed throughout Montage Health's hospital and clinics, transforming hallways, waiting rooms, patient rooms, and gathering spaces into places of reflection and discovery.
The collection is deeply rooted in the community it serves. Landscapes, photography, mixed media works, and rotating exhibitions celebrate Monterey County's heritage while creating welcoming spaces for patients and visitors.
"Every artwork has a purpose," Harbaugh says. "We carefully curate pieces for each space with the people who use it in mind. Art that speaks to young people may be featured at Ohana, our youth mental health program, while calming, nature-inspired works can help ease stress in places like our cancer center."
Therapeutic music in healthcare
Live performances regularly fill Community Hospital’s fountain court and Westland House, Montage Health's skilled nursing facility, offering calming melodies that soften clinical rhythms and create moments of respite.
Montage Health’s certified therapeutic musicians bring live music into patient rooms. Using carefully selected tempos, rhythms, tones, and musical techniques, the musicians tailor each session to a patient's condition, energy level, breathing pattern, and emotional needs. Music is adjusted in real time, creating personalized experiences designed to promote relaxation, support healing, reduce stress, and encourage rest.
A patient awaiting a procedure may hear gentle guitar melodies that help ease anxiety. Someone recovering from illness may find comfort in familiar songs. For families facing difficult circumstances, therapeutic music can provide moments of peace when words are difficult to find.
Inpatient televisions extend that experience beyond the bedside through a library of professionally recorded performances and soothing nature scenes available whenever someone needs a moment of calm.
A different kind of medicine
These programs reflect a philosophy that has become increasingly supported by research. Studies show how stress-reducing environments that incorporate positive distractions like art, nature, and music can improve the patient experience and contribute to healing. Montage Health embraced those principles decades before they became widely recognized in healthcare design.
To this day, that embrace is present in the forest views visible through patient room windows, artwork that transforms an institution into a gallery, live music that drifts through hallways, and the moments of comfort that these experiences provide during some of life's most challenging circumstances.
Medicine remains at the heart of healthcare. At Montage Health, it's complemented by the belief that beauty, creativity, nature, and human connection can help people heal, too.
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