Virtual Reality (VR) enables the low-cost production of realistic prototypes of buildings at early stages of architectural projects. Such prototypes may be used to gather the experiences of future users and iterate early on the design. However, it is essential to evaluate whether what is experienced within such VR prototypes corresponds to what will be experienced in re- ality. Here, we use an innovative method to compare the experiences of patients in a real building and in a virtual environment that plays the role of a prototype that could have been created by architects during design phase. We first designed and implemented a VR environment replicating an existing ambulatory pathway. Then, we used micro-phenomenological interviews to collect the experiences of real patients in the VR environment (n=8), along with VR traces and first-person videos and in the real ambulatory pathway (n=8). We modeled and normalized the experiences, and compared them systematically. Results suggest that patients live comparable experiences along various dimensions of experience such as thought, emotion, sensation, social and sensory perceptions, and that VR prototypes may be adequate to assess issues with architectural design. This work opens unique perspectives towards involving patients in User-Centered Design in architecture, though challenges lie ahead on how to design VR prototypes from early blueprints of architects.