There’s No Place Like Home, But Physical Therapy Center Is Close : Nursing home offers modules in which people can practice domestic tasks such as cooking their meals and making their beds.

A framed print, reading “Bless This House,” hangs on the wall. The refrigerator, adorned with finger-paint artwork, contains fresh apples and strawberries. A neatly made bed sits in the corner.

Ruth Craig, 64, knows this could be home. But it isn’t.

It is a replica, a shell. It is part of a physical therapy unit in Norwalk at the Southland Lutheran Home, where senior citizens with debilitating conditions can relearn the skills they need to live day to day.

One of the first such modules in Southern California, the real-life unit in the nursing home run by California Lutheran Homes and Community Services is considered by therapists to be a pragmatic approach to healing. The idea is to test patients, mostly elderly, who are nearing the end of their treatment and wish to return to independent lifestyles. By watching the patients function in a realistic environment, where they may cook their own food and make their own beds, therapists determine whether they are ready to leave.

The true-to-life module, part of the home’s rehabilitation center, is decorated with flowers and tasteful furnishings. Yet no matter how well-appointed or lifelike the 2-month-old replica may be, Craig says she wants out. That, after all, is the point.

“I just like being in my own home,” she says, breathing hard after an exercise in which she moved dishes from the refrigerator to a wooden cabinet.

Craig, who has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, is one of about 25 patients who have trained in the module since the center opened it. Now finishing up her third stay at Southland, she says the true-to-life therapy is difficult, but worth it.

“I tend to push myself. I have to cut back. The hardest part is keeping myself under wraps,” says Craig, a grandmother who is fond of playing the piano. “Each time, I get a little better.”

The mock domestic living area doesn’t make physical therapy any less demanding for the stroke patients and others who train in it several times a week. But part of its appeal, therapists say, is that it helps patients visualize what they can accomplish outside the center.

In the living area, patients can practice rising from the couch, dusting the coffee table, operating a stove and other skills, depending on the types of activities they performed before being admitted to the center for treatment.

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Across the hall, a black Acura Legend mounted on a rolling frame will become the next addition to the therapy sessions. Donated by a local Honda dealer, the car will become a proving ground for patients who need to enter and exit or load and unload a vehicle.

Next to the Legend, center officials have installed a set of grocery shelves, stocked with boxes of detergent and rolls of paper towels, and are awaiting a checkout machine, also donated, to simulate a trip to the market.

Center administrator Gary Stork says the three “modules,” taken together, will expand the therapy available to the elderly and allow, for the first time in the center’s short history, treatment of workers who are injured on the job and other types of outpatients.

“We want to take the patients to the highest functional level they can safely achieve,” occupational therapist Kent Emmert says.

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Even as the domestic living area provides patients with a familiar-looking classroom as they relearn the basics of their daily routines, it also serves as a walk-through exam of sorts, a place where their caretakers decide whether they stay at the center or return home.

“It’s very important that they know this is the testing ground on which we make our decision,” Emmert says.

Therapists acknowledge that very few of the patients who enter the center demonstrate enough strength and willpower in the mock living area to prove they can make it alone if they are released. Many are aided by family members or in-house nurses. Others simply stay at the center.

One 84-year-old woman, who asked not to be identified, began to cry as she talked about the importance of her therapy in the room.

“I need to practice everything,” she says. “Once I get home, I’ll be better.”

Only a handful of California health providers, mostly hospitals, have similar lifelike training areas. Beverly Manor, in Seal Beach, became the first nursing facility in the nation to embrace the concept when it assembled a series of modules in 1993. The idea behind the real-life therapy took root at Phoenix Memorial Hospital a decade ago. Now, about 75 health providers in the United States and Canada have constructed such facilities for their patients.