“Would my parents move there?”
This is the question that guides Simon Westray, Managing Director of SageHaus, as he and his team seek to redefine retirement villages in the UK by offering a completely new concept for later living.
Forget high rise blocks of apartments or flats built next to a busy roundabout, the SageHaus vision for later living is a series of idylls in natural surroundings, with Scandinavian-inspired ultra-energy efficient bungalows and cottages in low density schemes with bustling community hubs combined with easy access to support and integrated care. The first, The Sylvan, Surrey Heath, is due to launch early in 2027.
“When we looked around at the average retirement offering in the UK, it all just seemed so institutionalised and repetitive with small flats in high-rise buildings that look like care homes,” Simon explained. “I wouldn’t want to live in that kind of place, and I know many people feel the same. However, the benefits of living in a good retirement village are well-evidenced, so the question we set out to solve is — how do we retain the benefits of retirement villages while offering a concept that is appealing to the many people put off by what’s currently available?”
Rightsizing to a better quality of life
Research shows that living in a good retirement village improves people’s quality of life, helps them stay living independently for longer, reduces loneliness and isolation and improves mental and physical health outcomes. It also reduces pressure on health and social care services while releasing family-sized homes on to the market.
SageHaus’s own research revealed that, rather than extreme downsizing, older people wanted spacious houses that felt similar to their family home but were easier to live in, adaptable to single-level living if that became necessary, offered lower running costs and were easy to maintain.
The bungalows and cottages at The Sylvan, Surrey Heath are designed to deliver exactly this. Each dwelling has two or more bedrooms and two accessible bathrooms with walk-in showers, one of which is downstairs. Every home has a large kitchen diner that opens onto small private garden and has its own driveway so residents can park outside their home for as long as they continue to drive.
The ground floor of each cottage is designed to accommodate single-level living by having at least one separate room that can be used as a bedroom. Additional upstairs bedrooms can then be used for guests, live-in carers or storage. The homes have simple layouts that are easy to navigate for people who are visually impaired, and all homes are Part M4(ii) compliant which means they are suitable for ambulatory and wheelchair disabled occupants. Running costs for SageHaus homes will be dramatically lower than the average UK property thanks to a combination of photovoltaic panels, air source heat pumps, mechanical ventilation and heat recovery and ultra-efficient insulation that delivers an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) A rating.
“Choosing a SageHaus home means you can continue to live the life you love in a house that feels like a family home but will adapt to your needs over time, so you can age in place without having to move again,” explains Simon. “Our care partner can provide care at home when you need it, whether that’s a daily requirement or as part of rehabilitation after an illness or operation. It takes all the worry out of the future for residents and families alike. These homes are so energy efficient that, used properly, current modelling suggests that residents may end up paying as little as £250 a year for energy costs.”
A new model
In addition to the homes themselves, SageHaus developments will include Clubhouse community hubs to provide a space for socialising, activities and events. Unlike other retirement villages where everything is onsite, SageHaus works on a self-serve community-integration model. The Sylvan will provide social spaces with self-serve coffee, an honesty bar and catering provided by local restaurants and food service partners. This helps to keep the service charge low while maintaining important access to social events, organised activities and outings. An electric minibus will run trips to local shops and services, including the local health club where residents can enjoy discounted membership.
“Service charges are, understandably, an area of concern for people looking at retirement villages,” said Simon. “While the hotel-style villages with restaurants, coffee shops and swimming pools are great — they are also very expensive to run and residents end up paying for facilities they rarely use. Ours is a lighter model, inspired by Scandinavian practicality and functionality, where we partner with local providers to provide catering and events, while our team will be there to run the village day-to-day and provide support to residents, alongside our care partner.”
Overall, the SageHaus approach, with ultra-energy efficient individual dwellings set in natural surroundings with a lighter model of services and facilities and integrated care, presents an entirely fresh approach to later living. It presents a much-needed opportunity for people who would love the peace of mind and support of a retirement village seeking to ‘rightsize’ into a home they will love now and in the future.
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HAPA Architects has built an enviable reputation designing high-quality, low-energy and highly sustainable residential dwellings that are inspired by and engage with nature. These core principles align perfectly with SageHaus’s biophilic approach to later living and its dedication to building ultra-energy efficient homes within a dynamic and supportive community.
“Our initial conversations with SageHaus were very much about them wanting an architect with a shared vision, that wouldn’t simply stamp out the same old schemes with the same old institutionalised buildings,” said Stuart Paine, Director, HAPA Architects.
“The focus was on how to put wellbeing front and centre, fully integrated throughout the village, both in the design of the homes and the wider shared facilities. This is about delivering care both informally — through the design of the scheme and how it supports wellbeing — as well as formal care when required. It represents a welcome departure from the bare minimum, tick a few boxes, ‘residents’ lounge’ approach, to ‘how can we make every day better for SageHaus residents’? In my view, later living should be about joy and autonomy, and that’s what the SageHaus scheme is designed to deliver.”
The nature principle
Proven to reduce stress, improve mood and enhance cognitive function, biophilic design principles are embedded as a core wellbeing strategy in every SageHaus village, both in the designs of the dwellings themselves and across the developments’ shared facilities. A ‘biophilic approach’ describes how the buildings interact with the surrounding environment and the external spaces, blurring the boundaries between the inside and outside of dwellings. SageHaus homes are designed to give space to each individual dwelling and to residents themselves, while remaining part of an interconnected community.
SageHaus’s Surrey Heath development, The Sylvan, is set in a pine forest where all homes enjoy a forest outlook, and each home also has its own garden so residents can enjoy easy access to their own private outside space. The Scandinavian-inspired cottages and bungalows have black timber-effect and stone cladding so the buildings blend into the woodland background rather than compete with it.
Social contact, important for wellbeing and key to reducing loneliness, has also been integrated into the village’s design.
“We all have a social battery and being able to choose when you socialise and interact is fundamental to maintaining your autonomy.”
“We’re allowing for lots of seating areas and some communal areas externally, to enable spontaneous social interactions,” explains Stuart. “At this age, some residents will be single so it’s important to make it easy for them to find company. The Clubhouse community hub will provide an additional space where people can meet without having to invite people to their home. We all have a social battery and being able to choose when you socialise and interact is fundamental to maintaining your autonomy, so we have designed a great balance between private and shared spaces. The whole point is to create a village where people actively want to live and the choice to live there is joyful and expansive and exciting.”
A house that feels like home
In addition to bungalows, many of The Sylvan’s dwellings are cottages set over two storeys and designed to be adapted for single level living if required, with an accessible shower room on the ground floor and at least one room, separate from the main living area, that can be used as a bedroom. Every home also has its own private driveway.
“This is about how someone will feel when they move into a SageHaus home,” explains Stuart. “These are all generously-proportioned, well laid-out homes with large kitchen-dining spaces that open on to the garden. You can still have people over for lunch or to stay. You can still go upstairs to bed if you choose a cottage. Your car is right outside your door. But if you reach a point where stairs become difficult, you can easily live on the ground floor without having to move. You can continue to enjoy your life in a house where you have space to accommodate family and friends.
“It feels like a step forward into a new phase of life, not a step down into a smaller home where life is compromised. It doesn’t feel like you’re moving into a care home — it feels like you’re moving to a beautiful place to live where care is available when you need it. It’s a fundamental shift in perspective compared to many retirement developments.”
Futureproof design
SageHaus homes are designed to meet Building Regulations Part M4(ii) which means every home has accessible bathrooms and all rooms are accessible for both ambulant and wheelchair disabled people. Simple layouts make the homes easy to navigate for visually impaired people. If residents’ physical abilities evolve over time, their SageHaus home will adapt to suit their changing needs.
These well-insulated timber frame homes also have an Energy Performance Certificate rating of ‘A’ and include photovoltaic panels to generate electricity, underfloor heating, an air source heat pump and mechanical ventilation and heat recovery. Every window in each home will be assessed to measure potential solar gain (warmth from the sun that heats up the house) and tinted glass / brise soleil will be installed where needed to reduce excess heat.
All of this combines to create a dwelling that is comfortable all year round no matter what the temperature outside and, compared to the average UK home, dramatically lower energy bills. Current modelling suggests annual bills could be as low as £250 and residents will be offered training in how to use their ultra-energy efficient technology to maximum benefit.
“What we’ve designed with SageHaus marks a radical improvement for later living,” said Stuart. “These are joyful places with well-designed, sustainable homes where older people can live and enjoy a new phase of life with their autonomy firmly intact.”
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The UK’s population is ageing. The Office for National Statistics predicts that by mid-2049 the number of people aged 85 and over will have doubled to 3.6 million, representing 4.9% of the population. But where are they going to live when their family home no longer meets their needs?
One answer is to move to an integrated retirement community. Currently, only 0.6% of people in the UK live in retirement communities, compared to between 5 – 6% in the US, Australia and New Zealand. Cultural differences aside, the proven benefits of retirement villages to their residents and their potential to reduce pressure on health and social care services are well established, but the UK still lags behind.
In the UK, retirement communities came about as a way to help people avoid moving into a care home by providing built-in support. While they still excel at reducing the need for residential care, these days, retirement villages also offer an active, engaging lifestyle, with exercise classes, trips out and celebratory events. For residents, loneliness is eradicated, physical and mental wellbeing improves, and they and their families enjoy peace of mind.
Someone who has witnessed the evolution of integrated retirement communities since their inception is Dr Stephen Ladyman. In the early 2000s, Stephen was Minister for Community in the Department of Health at the start of that government’s drive to set standards and improve quality in the care sector. Before the Care Standards Act, care homes were rarely held to account. Care quality was patchy and often poor. Ultimately, this led to the government allocating £80m of funding to build developments that follow the extra care model to help people to continue living independently for longer.
While care quality and standards today are much improved, Stephen’s work led him to realise that better choices for later living were needed, not simply to avoid moving to a care home but to enable people to really enjoy their later years in an environment that enabled them to age in place.
Alongside his role as Chair of the National Autistic Society and advisor to SageHaus, Stephen also runs Oak Retirement, which operates several retirement villages across the UK, continuing his work to provide people in later life with a better quality of living. He believes there are three major benefits to living in a retirement village: retaining independence, eliminating loneliness and avoiding the need to move to a care home.
“When people move to a retirement village, they come out of their shells.”
“When people move to a retirement village, they come out of their shells,” explains Stephen. “It does all that it says on the tin in terms of reducing loneliness and improving mental and physical health. Residents maintain their independence while having the reassurance that there’s a package of support that can help them as they become more and more frail.
“The leading cause of ill health amongst old people is depression caused by loneliness. And in a retirement village, you won’t be lonely because there are other people like you there. You can have lunch in the restaurant with other people. You can go for a drink with other people. There’s always somebody to chat to and support if you need help. It’s also immensely reassuring for families.”
The third key benefit, in Stephen’s experience, is that the level of support on offer is sufficient to enable most people to age in place and live out their final days at home, rather than having to move to a care home. The exception to this is if people need 24-hour nursing or dementia care, but the vast majority of residents at Oak Retirement developments remain in their own home at the end of their life.
“If anybody ever leaves and goes into an ordinary care home without nursing cover, I would consider that a failure that we haven’t given them the opportunity to get the support they need from us on site,” said Stephen. “We have one or two examples where the NHS has actually paid for people’s support needs within one of our communities, so we are helping take the pressure off the health service too.
“In my view, the full-service extra care model, with 24-hour onsite support and hotel-style services is the ideal but the model SageHaus is proposing, where residents buy-in services, including care, as and when needed, is popular because of the lower service charge and these properties always sell well in similar developments that we run. Either approach is effective as long as you develop opportunities for socialising and build a genuine community – that’s the most important thing.”
With so many benefits on offer, how can we encourage more people to consider a move to an integrated retirement community? SageHaus is developing a new model with ultra-energy efficient individual dwellings set in beautiful, natural surroundings that offer residents a step forward into a new phase of life, rather than a step down to a small apartment. Designed to Part M4(ii) compliance, these homes are designed to adapt to people’s changing needs as they age. This fresh approach is designed to appeal to those who are put off by most of the existing retirement community properties on offer and will help encourage more people in the UK to spend their later years enjoying life in a well-designed retirement community.
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