Editors’ note: The Environments for Aging Conference + Expo heads to Phoenix, March 16-18. Here, speakers James Adams and Jill Cavanaugh highlight their session “E03 – The Best Years Are Ahead: Why Adaptive Reuse Is Ideal for Senior Living,” which will be presented on Tuesday, March 17. For more information, visit environmentsforaging.com.
Jill Cavanaugh
The current cohort of seniors who are today around 80 years of age constitutes the largest-ever demand for senior housing. This population also represents a generational seam between those born in the wake of the Great Depression and those born in the wake of World War II.
While individuals on the older end of this peer group are known for being thrifty and mainly concerned with meeting basic needs, those on the younger end, who were raised in an era of relative prosperity, have pushed developers toward providing more creative, distinct, high-quality environments.
James Adams
Developers are skilled at building senior living communities that satisfy basic residential and healthcare needs and provide programs and amenities to cater to a variety of lifestyles. However, it can be far more challenging to create authentic, homelike environments that feel instantaneously familiar for residents.
This desire for more personalized and homelike communities intersects with a parallel trend: a surplus of buildings, particularly in urban areas, that are underutilized. Buildings fall into obsolescence for a variety of reasons: fluctuating market conditions, shifts in demand, the intensity of investment necessary to modernize them, or current uses being at odds with the original design intent.
And yet existing or historic buildings often possess architectural styles, characteristics, and materials from another time and places that reflect a level of detail, care, and devotion to craft that’s uncommon today. Such environments are rich in diversity and inherently stimulating—making them an intuitive fit to transform to senior living.
Converting existing buildings to senior living
There’s an opportunity to not only meet the growing demand for senior living communities, but also to benefit from the oversupply of underutilized properties, by adaptively reusing existing historic buildings to create familiar, authentic places for aging residents.
Converting an existing building requires a thorough knowledge of existing systems and codes, synthesized with the unique programmatic requirements of the desired use, to inform creative solutions—as well as expertise in navigating the complexity of archaic systems and structures.
Inspīr Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., serves as a case study on how a historic building was transformed into a new senior living facility that combines the best qualities of residential, hospitality, and healthcare—proving that, for residents and building alike, the best years are still to come.
During the EFA Conference presentation, “The Best Years Are Ahead: Why Adaptive Reuse Is Ideal for Senior Living,” on Tuesday, March 17, 9:15-10:15 a.m., speakers will focus on the technical challenges to modernizing a century-old building; the ways in which designers capitalized on the historic building and context to create spaces that are simultaneously contemporary and traditional; and the lessons learned for addressing zoning hurdles for adaptive reuse at the scale of either the district or city, rather than on a project-specific, case-by-case basis.
For more information on the EFA Conference + Expo programming and to register, visit environmentsforaging.com.
Find updates and additional information on the 2026 EFA Conference + Expo here.
Jill Cavanaugh is a partner with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners (Washington, D.C.) and can be reached at [email protected]. James Adams is senior vice president in real estate development and acquisition for Maplewood Senior Living (Westport, Conn.) and can be reached at [email protected].
