A big house with a luxury kitchen, hardwood floors and all the amenities. What else would a baby boomer need in a home? How about wide hallways, easy open cabinets that require no bending, a shower that you can roll a wheelchair into and a lift to carry you upstairs? The newest trend in homebuilding is ging in place. Healthy people still in their 50s are preparing for a comfortable retirement by designing homes they will be able to live in for the rest of their lives. xhese aren what I would call estate homes to be passed on. These are just rewards the boomers are giving themselves, said Heather McCune, editor-in-chief of Luxury Home Builder magazine.Aging in place was a constant refrain among the thousands of home designers and builders at the four-day National Association of Home Builders show. Gone are the days when wealthy retirees in their 60s or 70s bought smaller homes in preparation for the quiet life, real estate agents say. People now have the money for a dream house in late middle age. obody looking to downsize, even if all the kids are gone. They want a bigger house with more cool stuff in it, said Ellen Crawford, a realtor in Atlanta fashionable northern suburbs.
McCune said wealthy boomers are asking for amenities they likely won need for years: master bedrooms on the ground floor, levers instead of knobs on doors and spigots, and toilets with wide berths to make them wheelchair-accessible. For the kitchen, designers were showing elevated dishwashers and pull-out shelving, all designed to reduce the amount of bending. Some even want spring-loaded cabinets that reveal bread-makers and mixers at the push of a button. deople buy these great houses and they don want to have to renovate them in 10 years. Everything has to be easier to use, said Mike Moldenhauer, who works for Kohler, which produces bathroom and kitchen fixtures. Moldenhauer was busy showing off the company new Wydromassage showers with multiple heads and steam functions. Shower rooms come with a seat built in and no ledge.
Builders are eliminating steps in other parts of the house, too. Boomers are especially fond of not having steps between the garage and kitchen anything to avoid the dreaded access ramps they see their parents putting in, McCune said. obody wants this one-foot-in-the-grave stuff like you see in Florida, Crawford said. xhey`e planning now so they can still have a big, beautiful, normal-looking home later. Many boomers can imagine retiring to houses as small as the ones where they were born, she said. The average size of new American homes has more than doubled in the last half century from 91 square metres in 1950 to 207 square metres in 1999, according to the home builders group. And even in a cooling stock market, wealthy boomers see no need to scrimp on their retirement estates.
ve heard wives ask their husbands whether a house would be hard to resell, and the husbands say, g gonna be dead. Uhat do I care if it hard for the kids to sell? Crawford said.
