Home is your comfort space, and for many of us, it’s where we plan to stay to the bitter end! While the layout of your home may serve your needs now, there is a strong possibility that adjustments will have to be made as you age. Sarah and Bruce welcome Josh Safdie, Managing Principal at KMA Architecture + Accessibility to share his expertise on how to make sure your home is safely equipped for you.
When you think about aging in place and just define it a bit more because I think about the safety usability and beauty and I’m wondering how you sort of weigh those things and what you think of aging in place and how would you define it?
I think those are all pieces of it particularly in a single-family residential context. There are people who do this work every day who are starting to talk about aging-in-community as opposed to aging in place and I think that is a really important piece to it as well. The idea that your home shouldn’t be the thing to tell you when it’s time to leave home. Because leaving home also means leaving your doctor, grocer, laundromat, cousin neighbors, this community, and all this infrastructure that is really important and becomes even more important as you get older.
So how do we pull this apart because there’s the traditional aging-in-place in the single-family and there’s this new idea that’s aging-in-community.
I didn’t mean to suggest they are different but if you are able to age in place, which might mean growing older and beginning to experience functional limitations, if you are able to do that in your home where you already live, then by definition you are remaining in the community.
Got it, so you are adding nuance to an old traditional phrase by pointing out that the home in the aging-in-place is actually part of a context, which is super important as you age. Are you thinking that aging in place means staying in the house that you have been in? As that house might be good for three kids, is there thinking that staying in a house that needs to be maintained, single-family is not a good idea, and this idea that making communities where that overhead upkeep is less?
I think that’s an important consideration also. Ultimately aging in place is an idea that becomes very personal when an individual takes it on.
What are things you do to make a house suitable for aging in place?
The baseline is mobility. Because that is often the first thing that will become limited in a way that it impacts your daily living. After that really adaptability over time is important. You may want features in the house later in life that you don’t need right now.
Like what?
It could be things like you prefer to sleep upstairs but the ability to move to the downstairs and to live all on one floor would be important. So that could be a sunroom or dining room and maybe you renovate it when you move in so it’s all set up, maybe you add a full bath on the floor when you move in or maybe you just think it through enough to know that is a possibility in the future.