Robert Davies (Image credit: Courtesy of Montgomery Sisam Architects)
At The Rekai Centre at Cherry Place, a long-term care community scheduled to open in downtown Toronto in 2028, outdoor spaces are conceived as an extension of everyday life, rather than as an amenity residents visit occasionally.
The 13-story, 348-bed community, designed by Montgomery Sisam Architects (Toronto), features large promenade decks, terraces, and rooftop therapy gardens, creating a range of places to connect residents with the outdoors, surrounding city, and one another.
Here, Robert Davies, principal at Montgomery Sisam Architects, discusses strategies for incorporating outdoor amenities on an urban site and what lessons the industry can learn from this project.
Environments for Aging: What challenges did you face incorporating outdoor amenities into a vertical building?
Robert Davies: The biggest challenge was the very constrained urban site. The building occupies a long, narrow lot of approximately 79 by 328 feet, while accommodating 348 residents and all of the required care, support, and amenity spaces.
Typically, long-term care communities provide mandated garden space at grade, but the density required on this site made that approach insufficient. Instead, outdoor space had to be distributed vertically through terraces, promenade decks, and rooftop gardens. This allowed the project to provide meaningful outdoor environments while also maintaining relatively short and accessible connections from residents’ rooms to exterior spaces.
EFA: How is demand for outdoor amenities in senior living changing and what types of spaces are popular?
Davies: The emphasis is shifting from simply providing an outdoor space to providing a range of outdoor experiences. Residents have different interests, abilities, and preferences, so a successful environment should offer opportunities for socializing, quiet time, therapy, recreation, and connection with nature.
There’s also value in giving residents a sense of the world beyond the care setting. In an urban project like Rekai Cherry Place, views and visual connections to the surrounding neighborhood can be just as meaningful as the landscape immediately around the building. For people who may spend much of their time indoors, those connections can help maintain a sense of independence and participation in city life.
EFA: What design features help make outdoor spaces inviting and accessible to residents?
Davies: The most important consideration is designing from the residents’ perspective. For someone with limited mobility, small differences in distance, circulation, or changes in level can determine whether an outdoor space is genuinely usable.
At Rekai Cherry Place, exterior spaces are integrated into the building rather than concentrated in one remote location. Their accessibility is considered alongside the organization of resident areas, allowing outdoor access to become part of the normal movement through the building.
Beyond accessibility, the spaces need to offer a reason to stay. A successful outdoor environment should have places to sit, opportunities for interaction, visual interest, and a sense of enclosure and comfort—qualities that make it feel like another room in the home rather than simply an exterior space.
EFA: Some communities find their outdoor amenities go underused. Why so?
Davies: Often, the problem is that an outdoor space is designed as an amenity rather than as part of the community’s daily life. If residents need to make a special trip to reach it, or if there is little to do once they arrive, it’s unlikely to become a regular part of their routine.
The most successful spaces give residents a reason to use them. That might be meeting a friend, spending time with family, participating in therapy, or simply having a change of setting. This is why outdoor design should be considered together with programming, circulation, and the everyday patterns of residents and staff.
EFA: What lessons can the industry learn from this project?
Davies: One of the key lessons is that urban density and quality of life do not have to be opposing goals. Rekai Cherry Place shows that a relatively small site can support a large long-term care community without giving up meaningful connections to the outdoors or the surrounding city.
It also demonstrates the value of treating outdoor space as fundamental to the design of long-term care rather than as an amenity added at the end. When it is considered alongside resident experience, circulation, care, and community life from the outset, it can contribute to a very different model of what long-term care can feel like.
EFA: Share an outdoor amenity you’d like to introduce on a future project.
Davies: A future project could explore outdoor spaces that more deliberately connect long-term care residents with the wider community. That could take the form of a shared garden or landscape where residents, family members, children, students, and neighbors can participate in activities together.
Rekai Cherry Place already explores community integration through its relationship with George Brown College and the PSW training program. Extending that principle outdoors could create opportunities for gardening, learning, therapy, and informal interaction between generations. The landscape could become a place where residents and the wider community naturally connect and share experiences.
For more on this project, read the first look article here.
