Senior Living
Designing for Longevity
Smallwood understands the challenges Senior Living developers and owners face. It is a complex business and an even more complex real estate venture. Market analysis and demand studies help set the strategy, but the right design is what makes a community succeed. By 2030, the U.S. will for the first time have more residents aged 65+ than children. All Baby Boomers, and roughly a fifth of the total population, will have reached traditional retirement age. That leaves us with the central question: how do we design for this new era of Senior Living? Today’s seniors are active, social, and physically engaged well into their 80s. As they age into new levels of care, they still want a connection to the neighborhood they’ve called home for decades, real choices in dining, and the chance to keep contributing to their community.
Smallwood designs with seniors in mind. Walking distances, amenities, efficiencies, and environmental quality all shape a successful community. Smallwood’s in-house team, spanning architecture, interior design, experiential graphic design, and landscape design, works in tandem to solve it.
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Great senior housing borrows from five-star hospitality: an organized, functional space that still feels like home. It’s a complex challenge, and an exciting one to solve. Elements of Arrival Porte-cochère, Front Desk, Community Living Room
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Active Lifestyle Amenities
Aquatics, Fitness Center, Outdoor Pathways
Unique Dining Formats Cafe, Casual Dining, Specialty Dining
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require leaving the neighborhood behind. Blurring the lines Smallwood’s adaptive reuse of 100 Edgewood this principle in practice. The project between multi-family illustrates converts a 1960s Mid-Century Modern office building, originally designed by SOM, into and senior living multifamily residential, sited in the heart of As America’s senior population surges, Smallwood is rethinking where and how older adults live, favoring designs that weave elder housing directly into the urban fabric instead of isolating it on separate campuses. The design principle threading through this evolution is proximity over separation. Smaller footprints, shared common spaces, ground-floor flexibility (rather than mandatory retail), and blended-use buildings let elder housing sit inside the existing city rather than beside it, a physical expression of the idea that aging shouldn’t
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downtown Atlanta directly adjacent to Hurt Park and the Hurt Park Streetcar station. Rather than building new on the city’s edge, the design reuses existing urban infrastructure and connects residents to transit, green space, and the surrounding neighborhood’s 24-hour activity. It’s the same logic that makes elder housing work best when it’s folded into a functioning neighborhood rather than set apart from one: amenity-rich, walkable, and already wired into the systems residents rely on every day.
A successful senior living project increasingly looks less like a standalone campus and more like a thoughtfully integrated piece of the multifamily fabric, built for the same lifestyle expectations as any other resident, but with the care and design nuance seniors uniquely require.
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newly created Main Street, prioritizing Blending into Existing awalkability and street-level activity over isolated, single-use blocks. That same DNA, Urban and Suburban compact, mixed-use, pedestrian-first, is exactly what makes a neighborhood work for aging Neighborhoods residents, too. As America’s senior population surges, Smallwood is rethinking where and how older adults live, favoring designs that weave elder housing directly into the urban fabric instead of isolating it on separate campuses. The design principle threading through the evolution of how we think about senior living space is proximity over separation. It’s a principle we already practice: our Downtown Fayetteville master plan wove multifamily residential over ground-floor retail along
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Smaller footprints, shared common spaces, ground-floor flexibility, and blended-use buildings let elder housing sit inside the existing city rather than beside it: a physical expression of the idea that aging shouldn’t require leaving the neighborhood behind.
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Rethinking Density As A Form Of Care As land grows scarcer and costs climb, Smallwood is rethinking how much a single senior living site can hold, favoring designs that consolidate care, culture, and community rather than spreading them across multiple facilities. The design principle threading through this evolution is density with purpose. Rather than treating scale as a compromise, King David Towers uses it to fold an entire ecosystem, housing, healthcare, and culture, into one connected campus. Smallwood’s design for the 700-unit development in Gwinnett County illustrates this in practice. Two 16-story towers, each holding 350 identical units, rise on a tightly constrained site, incorporating several previously dispersed local senior facilities into a single, unified campus. Rather than building outward across multiple parcels, the design builds up and distributes its program across both structures, a 1,000+ seat performance theater, on-site daycare, and physical therapy programming woven between the two towers so each building contributes to, and draws from, a shared community core. A Bellagio-style dancing fountain anchors the space between them, announcing the campus’s civic presence and signaling that this is not a clinical facility set apart from daily life, but a destination woven into it. It’s the same logic that makes senior living work best when scale is treated as an asset rather than a constraint: two towers, one community, one continuum of care.
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A single tower, thoughtfully layered, can deliver everything a dispersed campus once required, built for the same lifestyle expectations as any resident, but consolidated at the density today’s land economics demand.
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Creating Space for Family and Community As we age, social connection becomes one of the strongest predictors of health and quality of life, but that connection has to be designed for, not assumed. Common areas, shared amenities, and outdoor gathering spaces aren’t add-ons to a senior living campus, they’re the physical infrastructure that makes community possible. 12 |
Smallwood’s Alpharetta City Center shows this principle at civic scale. The 22-acre master plan brings together a City Hall, a five-acre public park, a one-acre Town Green, pocket parks, and street-level retail into one walkable, interconnected district, built specifically to reinforce downtown as what one project account calls “a focal point of civic life.” Inside City Hall, a 145-seat Council Chamber, a permanent exhibit on Alpharetta’s history, and dedicated event rooms give residents places to gather for public life, not just pass through. The project’s own recognition, a ULI People’s Choice Award for the Public Realm, points to what made it work: the space itself was designed to be shared. The lesson scales down easily to a senior living campus: lounges, libraries, courtyards, and event rooms only build community if they’re planned as gathering places from the start, not incidental leftover space.
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Architecture Interior Design Master Planning Experiential Graphic Design Landscape Architecture
3495 Piedmont Rd NE Building 10, Suite 700 Atlanta, GA 30305 USA Phone: 404.233.5453 www.smallwood-us.com