SWBR of Rochester, N.Y., started working with client and neighbor St. John’s on a master plan for the organization in 2006, eventually launching two residentially located Green House communities in the area. That was followed by the addition of independent living site St. John’s Meadows, integrated within the town of Brighton, N.Y.

So when the idea of active-adult community Brickstone by St. John’s surfaced, at the heart of the plan was to take the Meadows community and turn it up a notch, all while not losing touch with the tenets of its predecessors. “It envisioned attracting a slightly younger demographic that had existing community connections and wanted to keep them,” says Thomas R. Gears, principal of SWBR. “The idea is to allow that within a new community.”

The result is a mix of independent living apartments, townhomes, and bungalows, the first phase of which opened in 2012 and the second in 2014, that’s immersed in the local landscape and was guided by the notion of “what not to do,” Gears says. “We didn’t want to have a typical senior community that felt like this was a place only for seniors. It’s a place where elders can engage with the town of Brighton and city of Rochester community, so that was the goal right from the start.”

The idea of creating zones and particularly connection points that would support a multigenerational experience for residents took the project from there, from inviting the outside community in to integrating with the nearby Meadows via walking paths that also tie into the town’s existing trail system.

And it worked, earning the community this year’s only Award of Merit in the EFA Design Showcase, with jurors applauding the effort. “It’s great to see a senior community that’s designed to blend into the surrounding community in a way that goes beyond aesthetics—functionally, as well,” noted one juror.

Part of achieving that was use of the concept of new urbanism, brought to the table by Duncan Walker, design architect of the former firm CSD Architects (Baltimore), which partnered with architect of record SWBR on the project. “For many years we’d been trying to [make] CCRCs and retirement living indistinguishable from the surrounding community and look like a real community,” Walker says. “This is an early realized example, and of course it’s not that old. It’s something that’s been talked about a lot but hasn’t been done and completed in very many places.”

In practice, the theory of new urbanism is to design a space as though it’s naturally occurring, except it features special accommodations to support residents’ issues as they age, Walker continues. For example, traditional homes in the area are built with the first floor 3-4 feet above ground with stairs going up; at Brickstone, homes are built with a similar aesthetic but skipping all the stairs up to the front porch.

Other tenets of the design include a highly walkable community that doesn’t require the use of a car. In fact, the entire site is designed so that residents can experience everything they need within a 10-minute walk. The key to achieving that is density, with 102 units on its 17 developed acres. And that approach was a plus on the business side, too. “By having a dense development, that decreased the site infrastructure costs and kept them contained. It worked out to be an affordable project for the owner,” Gears says.

The mix of residence types and sizes—with exteriors designed to mimic the Upstate New York architectural flavor—also allowed the team to have variation visually that flouts the often large and uniform nature of senior living sites. “That uniform character gets stretched over 250,000 square feet, and that can get pretty deadly looking,” Walker says. “We’re going for the other extreme, where we’re disguising a relatively large apartment building as a series of buildings.”

The result serves as a sort of town center to Brighton, sited on a main thoroughfare between a retail core and residential center, with very little in between. Organizing the campus is a hierarchy of spaces that places the public venues (Village Square), anchored by an on-site restaurant and meeting center, by the road with clear cues for where visitors might park, etc., and the residences located further in. “There’s a tendency for suburbs not to have centers, or to have a lot of suburb and very little center, so this is an extra sub-center for the neighborhood it’s in,” Walker says. 

Jennifer Kovacs Silvis is executive editor of Environments for Aging. She can be reached at jennifer.silvis@emeraldexpo.com.

For more EFA Design Showcase coverage, see: