Seniors housing communities should take cues from the hospitality sector
By James Kraft
I am a self-named “expert without portfolio.” I have never built anything in seniors housing (yet), but I am known as one of the most prolific “dirt guys” in the seniors housing business.
I have been the real estate broker for some 50 land transactions for assisted living communities, CCRCs, active adult communities, skilled nursing facilities and drug treatment centers. I am primarily involved in the location and team building for the land use approval of sites, not in the design of the buildings and certainly not in the operation of them, which I characterize as the “bedpan” side of the business.
As the available and approvable sites are often few and far between, nothing bothers me more than when a great site is developed with a poorly designed building.
What is poor design?
– A lack of “wow” at the front entrance
One of my architect friends here in Florida came to my somewhat fancy country club clubhouse.
He walked in the door, saw the ceremonial staircase blocking the view of the golf course and said that the entry was less than awe-inspiring.
I just walked into a new CCRC that has a main entrance that looks like a tunnel, and when you walk in to the lobby you see through to the outside through tiny windows. There is no “wow.” This is in a new, $200 million building, mind you.
– Improper location of elevators
I like elevators close to an entrance lobby so you can get from outside to inside to upstairs in the shortest path possible, especially for seniors with limited mobility. This is not the case in many buildings, where the elevators are hidden or separated.
There’s also a problem with “value engineering.” In certain places there should be two elevators, such as at the location closest to dining, but developers put only one to save money.
I prefer open glass elevators, but for that you have to like atriums, which I will discuss a few paragraphs below.
– Lack of a walking path and driveway around the whole building
This is the simplest mistake site planners make.
From an approval standpoint, an assisted living application in New Jersey was denied recently. The federal judge ruled that, because a fire truck could not get around the building, the request made under the Fair Housing Act to allow the project was not “reasonable accommodation.”
On the fire access road, it’s an absolute requirement is to put a walking path. I can list several assisted living communities and CCRCs that violate this easy principle.
– Atrium design in seniors housing, where are you?
I love Embassy Suites Hotels because the dining, the recreation, the pool and the waterfalls and walking paths are all within a beautiful atrium. In all sorts of weather it is a beautiful place to be.
Glass elevators, catwalks, open skylights and windows looking into units all work perfectly for my favorite hotels. Why not use the same approach for independent living or assisted living?
I had a conversation with the then-chairman of a prominent assisted living company, along with one of his board members, an architecture professor, who had just come back from a European tour of seniors housing communities. The photos showed a beautiful seniors housing project built around a magnificent atrium.
“Why not build our next project around an atrium?” I asked. “I don’t like atriums,” was the answer. He was the boss, and that attitude resulted in OK buildings that always lacked “wow” on otherwise-great pieces of real estate. Hence my gripe.
– How many different floorplans do you need?
I have been in CCRCs with 20 different floor plans. That makes selling the unit to someone like my 87-year-old mother-in-law extremely difficult as there are too many choices. The architect has to do four units types at maximum.
Design the building to accommodate limited choices. The added benefit to having fewer floorplans is that building a repetitive unit decreases construction costs dramatically. The construction crew learns it once and then just repeats the unit multiple times. This is not rocket science, just common sense.
– See-thorough buildings
I hate walking into a building and seeing a wall.
One of my favorite assisted living communities is on a very shallow site, and resulted in a narrow building. So when you walk into the building you look right through to the back of the building. You see trees and light on the edge of the narrow property, and it looks terrific. This may violate many feng shui principles, but it works nicely and I like it.
So as the “expert without portfolio,” what would I build as I morph into an “expert with portfolio?”
Someone has to build the Embassy Suites of the seniors housing business, and I want to do this here in Boca Raton and elsewhere. This means a grand resort-style entrance with wide and high porte-cochere, a big lobby desk/concierge, with glass elevators close by leading to the upper floors surrounding a not-too-wide atrium.
The ground floor will have the food service, the pool and the sitting areas, and of course all of this will sit above an open-air, well-lit, handicap-accessible parking garage.
Utopia? No, Del Boca Vista!
James Kraft, Esq., is a broker who represents seniors housing, drug treatment and other special needs providers, and home builders, in acquiring sites for development. He lives in Boca Raton, Fla.