‘They don’t just stay in a room waiting to die’: new buildings giving older people

If you have friends or relatives in care homes, or live in one yourself, you may be familiar with what is often the standard offer. Residents are kept behind locked doors, rarely granted a walk outside, instead stuck in armchairs in front of blaring televisions, surrounded by equipment redolent of medical rather than domestic spaces, deprived of the ability to make decisions about almost anything. A care home might be a big old house awkwardly converted, or a new-build as ruthlessly cost-efficient as a distribution centre or a budget hotel. Even where staff and management are genuinely committed to the wellbeing of residents (and there are reported instances where this is not the case), it seems hard to escape the pervasive deadening formula.

This, even if you are not yet old and don’t suffer from dementia, is something about which you should care, as the above is a future that could be coming for you. It’s an issue for society in general, as the population ages. It’s also an area where architecture has a role to play, as the physical environment can demonstrably improve or harm the wellbeing of residents. Done right, design can make the care of elderly people less stressful and more effective. It can reduce the need for expensive medical and other interventions.

For architects, who generally want to do more with their skills than adding some style to an office block or a private house, designing for older people and those living with age-related diseases such as dementia gives them a chance to contribute to something of social value. And so you get works such as the John Morden Centre in Blackheath, south-east London – a day care centre for residents of a retirement community by MAE Architects, winner of last year’s Stirling prize – and Appleby Blue in nearby Bermondsey, a “21st-century almshouse” by Witherford Watson Mann. With both projects, the architects went many extra miles to achieve such things as good daylight; strong senses of connection with the outside and between different parts of the building; materials that are natural and pleasurable; and corridors that, rather than functional thoroughfares, are enjoyable places to linger.

The Village Landais Alzheimer, on the edge of the town of Dax in south-west France, is a comprehensive attempt to “give real life back” to people with Alzheimer’s, as one staff member puts it, to “create conditions where they don’t just stay in a room waiting to die”. It is modelled on the Hogeweyk dementia village in the Netherlands, a celebrated 14-year-old facility with the look and layout of a village. The Dax project is similarly designed to have the life and appearance of a traditional community, with familiar and legible architecture based on features common in the region, albeit in simplified modern forms. There is a “bastide” – an arcaded square with a…