Designing a Home You Can Stay In

The most forward-looking requests we get are about staying put. Owners in their fifties and sixties building a custom home increasingly ask for what the industry calls universal design, and the good news is that done well, it's invisible.

The big moves are planning moves: a main-floor suite (or a stacked closet that can become an elevator), a zero-threshold entry from the garage, and hallways and doors at 36 inches. These cost almost nothing at design time and a great deal to retrofit.

The smaller moves are details our carpenters now treat as standard: blocking in bathroom walls for future grab bars, curbless showers with linear drains, lever handles, and lighting plans that assume older eyes need more light and less glare.

None of this makes a home look institutional. Our Cherry Hills suite addition is the project we point to, a spa bath that happens to have a curbless shower and blocking in every wall. Design for the long term is simply good design.