It seems like many of the best ideas out there for aging share a common element: expense. I think about them the way I do about the fantastic homes pictured in gorgeous shelter magazines like Architectural Digest: Lovely, but completely unattainable. So often, these innovative retirement communities, or continuing care communities that require an immense up-front deposit along with substantial monthly payments, seem like something accessible only to those families that have amassed wealth.
Take, for example, the lovely Taunton Press book, The House to Ourselves. Subtitled "Reinventing Home Once the Kids Are Grown," it chronicles in loving detail the design decisions made by twenty empty-nester couples and one group of empty-nester friends [Cheesecake, discussed in other posts within this blog]. Other than the Cheesecake group, and one couple who moves into a new university-sponsored retirement community and engages an architectural firm to make the unit they select less cookie-cutterish, all the exemplars, even if they are technically downsizing, involve either new construction or very significant rehab of existing dwellings.
As with all Taunton Press books, including the Sarah Susanka Not So Big House books, this one is filled with lovely homes, all architect-designed, on incredible properties, and with gorgeous high quality materials and and undoubtedly extremely expensive finish detailing. It's dispiriting. I guess that the most positive takeaway is to focus not on the incredibly costly shelter ideas depicted here, but upon the perhaps universal values underlying these baby-boomers' choices, as interpreted by the architects who translated their desires into reality: single level living, an open floor plan, accessible design, space flexible enough to allow for visits from family or possibly eventually live-in help, and personalization of that space to permit hobby and craft rooms.
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