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GREENSBORO — Patients at Camden Place love the wide, airy hallways and the full bathrooms in each room.

No more walking down the hallway to get her shower, said resident Florence Boyd, 97 , who moved from the old Evergreens facility to Camden Place when it opened in August .

Camden Place is one of three new, state-of-the-art facilities that will replace the 1970s-era Evergreens on West Wendover Avenue and a companion site in High Point.

The Evergreens facility had outlived its usefulness, said executive director Fred Soule . The nonprofit that runs the skilled nursing home decided it was not worth the cost to upgrade it, and the organization couldn’t afford to build new.

So, starting in 2006 , Evergreens began looking at for-profit companies to invest in new facilities in exchange for taking over Evergreens’ patients. As part of that process, Evergreens had to ask the state to transfer patients. The state regulates the number of medical beds allowed per facility, per county.

Bob Walker , whose Suncrest Management runs nursing homes in Tarboro and Jefferson, built and will operate Camden Place and Ashton Place . Dick Bennett , who runs a family-owned facility in Trinity, built and will run the Shannon Gray site in Jamestown.

“These are really super opportunities for seniors in this county,” Soule said of the new facilities.

Camden Place, on Marithe Court near I-40 and Wendover , can serve up to 135 residents. Ashton Place, expected to open next month in McLeansville, can serve up to 134 . Shannon Gray, which will replace the High Point facility, is expected to open in March 2010 to serve up to 150 residents.

Camden Place is broken into four smaller “communities,” connected in the middle by common spaces such as an Internet cafe, lounge and a chapel dedicated to Evergreens. Flat-screen TVs adorn the walls of each room.

Each community — named for flowers, such as Azalea and Southern Rose — has its own dining area, family meeting room and access to the inner courtyard with a fountain. Each also has its own entrance, which limits visitor traffic.

“It just makes living quieter and easier for the whole family,” Walker said.

The high-tech building includes touch-screen panels on the walls for certified nursing assistants to log information. Doctors hook up their computers at the nurse’s stations to log their notes and orders.

Nurses still write notes in charts but soon will go paperless, too, said administrator Lee Webb Cole .

The facilities will offer short- and long-term care as well as outpatient therapy, Cole said. They’ll also take in hospice patients and home-care patients whose caregivers need a short break, she said.

Residents from Evergreens slated for Camden Place have moved. Other Evergreens residents scheduled for Ashton Place are expected to move next month.

Eva Mae Noble, 75 , said she misses Evergreens, where she spent the past two years. The place had become familiar to her, she said.

But the new place is much bigger, with long halls, Noble said. She loves playing bingo and attending the music program and church services. She likes the nursing staff and said many of her friends moved to Camden Place, too.

“I like being here, too,” she said.

As for the Evergreens property, Guilford County will have the final say. The nonprofit management company had leased the buildings from the county. Those leases will end when all the residents have been moved, likely by June, Soule said.

The properties will revert to the county and have been recommended for sale as surplus property, said County Manager Brenda Jones Fox . That includes buildings leased by LifeSpan , which provides services for developmentally disabled adults.

County commissioners would have to approve selling the property, she said.

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com