Posts Tagged ‘Appliances’

Kitchens in Independent Living Communities

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

I am in Phoenix at the ALFA conference. It takes a long time to get to Phoenix from Vancouver in spite of the fact that the two cities are in the same time zone (in the summer—Phoenix operates on standard time all year long). I spent part of the travel time reading Jim Moore’s latest book, Independent Living and CCRCs.  Chapter 11 discusses high impact design features for independent living communities. Number one on the list is full-function kitchens, even in places serving three meals per day.

Yesterday I toured three life care communities in the area and I will be posting more about these three over the next few weeks, along with highlights from the conference itself. All three had full-function kitchens in their independent living units. My tour guides were shocked when I told them that full-function kitchens in Canadian independent living communities were rare. One of the three is upgrading its units—it is 20 years old—and the new fridges are the two door type with ice and water dispensers on one of the doors. The contrast with Danby bar fridges could hardly be starker. The upgraded stoves are full size with burners that are flush with the surface.

American operators include full-function kitchens more for the impression they create than for their actual utility. Consumers associate the lack of full kitchens with nursing homes and they don’t want to go there!

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More News from Central Alberta

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

I hate to return to my laundry fetish, the subject of a recent post, but I saw something new (to me) this week. Purely by accident I met one of the Masterpiece residents on my tour and she invited me to see her suite.  A clothes lover, she found her unit short of closet space so installed an armoire in the bathroom. I think she got it at Rona or something like that. It looked great. In another closet she installed a washer/dryer—the kind that only requires 110 volts, the maximum allowable in her building (in individual units that is). I used a machine like this in Tokyo recently, but I have never seen them used in seniors’ buildings in North America. You can hook them up virtually anywhere as long as there is a plumbing line nearby. They take about 3 ½ hours to wash and dry a load but you don’t have to do any transferring of wet clothes and the machines are very energy efficient. Research done in the States (admittedly by LG, a major manufacturer of laundry equipment), suggests that in-suite laundry increases rent potential by $40 to $100 per month, and condo prices by $5,000 to $15,000.

For people who don’t want their own in-suite laundry equipment, communal laundry rooms have come a long way in some seniors’ housing projects. Flat-screen TVs, fridges and microwaves, and comfortable chairs can transform the mere act of washing and drying your laundry into a whole new experience. Years ago we wrote a report for CMHC called Aging Tenants in the Private Rental Market. The objective of the report was to discover how private landlords were coping with aging residents. Very well, as it turned out, but one of the memories of that report that has stuck with me was the laundry room in a big building in Victoria. The laundry room was the social hub of the building—people read there, or played cards with their neighbours, or just talked.  Of course it was a big room, the only laundry room in the building. People sometimes think that laundry rooms on every floor of a seniors’ building are absolutely necessary, but I have seen many situations where central laundry rooms have worked fine.

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What’s New in Toronto

Monday, March 15th, 2010

I just got back from the 3d Canadian Seniors Housing Forum, organized by Insight Information. As the first presenter at the two day conference, I had the opportunity to say everything first! That can be a great advantage. My presentation was entitled “A Year in Review” and over the next two or three weeks I will be posting some of the content of my presentation and of others as well.

Whenever I am faced with the five hour flight and three hour time change required of a visit to Toronto, I try to take maximum advantage of my time there. This time I toured two new projects—Origin at Evergreen in Mississauga, and The Dunfield, near Yonge and Eglinton. Evergreen is a big project: 160 condos, 140 rental units, and 45,000 square feet of amenity space, with another 54 garden flat condo units slated for the next phase.  The Dunfield is big too, at least by Vancouver standards: 177 rental units.  I’d characterize Evergreen as mid-range and The Dunfield as high end (eg two bedroom units topping out at $8,400 per month, although studios start at $3,300).

I am going to be coming back to these two projects in future posts, but for now I am going to focus on—wait for it!—laundry equipment. I haven’t quite got over the fabulous red chandelier in The Dunfield’s spa, although it is definitely something to be seen, but I have always taken perhaps an unhealthy interest in washers and dryers and that’s what I want to talk about today. The Dunfield includes a washer/dryer in each unit, even the studios. If people have absolutely no desire ever to do any laundry in their own unit, the appliances will be removed to create additional storage space, but few people have so far made this request.

Elsewhere in the country, in-suite washers and dryers are uncommon in supportive rental projects, the theory being that 80+ residents don’t want to do their own laundry and don’t want to give up storage space. But in light of our endless quest to lower the average age of entry into supportive housing, in-suite washers and dryers can be one way to help foster that sense of independence so valued by our customers.

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