Why One Senior Living Architecture Firm Is Preparing For A Wave Of Community Renovations

With so many aging communities changing hands and a low level of new openings, SFCS Architects is preparing for a “modernization push” in the coming years.

NIC data shows the senior living industry is grappling with many aging properties and an industrywide average property age of 25 years. And needs of the baby boomer generation can’t be served by building anew, at least with currently low construction rates, either, according to Curtis Jennings III, managing principal at SFCS.

“There’s just no way to build fast enough,” he told Senior Housing News.

Retrofitting aging buildings with new finishes, amenities or additions is a way that companies can help meet more demand from the boomers without building anew.

Owners of communities are undertaking renovations to promote socialization, Jennings said. SFCS was involved in a 2016 expansion of Westminster Canterbury Lynchburg, an aging property originally built in the 1970s. SFCS oversaw the renovation of the community to add more health care offerings, high-end independent living units, common spaces for residents and three new dining venues.

“For some campuses, it’s not feasible to do an expansion,” Jennings said. “So we are really strategically looking at where we can reduce some of the care beds, or some of the resident beds, to provide those spaces that residents are looking for to attract them to come on to campus.”

SFCS also is taking on adaptive reuse practices along the U.S. East Coast, and is in the process of converting three office buildings into independent living communities.

Jennings said there are multiple draws to the practice as a whole, from generally shorter timelines than new builds and greater sustainability practices.

“The embodied carbon in an existing building right now is a huge thing,” he said. “How can we be creative and really use what’s there?”

When renovating and breathing new life into an older product, SFCS draws inspiration from the existing materials used in the community’s construction and decoration and incorporates it in a new way to blend old with new.

SFCS typically focuses on understanding a community’s infrastructure and programming by meeting with a community’s operations teams to plan out project scope and anticipate future needs or challenges.

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