A Home That Grows Old With You

“Don’t bother coming. Christmas is canceled.”

It was December 22, 2014, and I was walking into a holiday party at Modern Times in North Park when my phone pinged with a photo of my mother’s foot on an ER bed, bandaged to high heaven, two red toenails poking out at the top. Another ping with the Grinch directive canceling my little family’s annual Christmas Day pilgrimage to Seattle. Lo, the drama!

Of course, we didn’t let her cancel. The Gaydi Project, as I call my mother, had fallen off a step stool while decorating and fractured her heel. We arrived to find her bedbound, and so began my education in caregiving for my parent—an otherwise independent person—while also parenting my then 9-year-old. As The Gaydi Project was on heavy narcotics and weed (another article entirely) and largely immobile, my husband and I took over everything she normally did as a go-getting zip-switcher (her word for weaving through sidewalk crowds). Vibrant and adventurous, she hated being infirm, hated the loss of independence, hated us all up in her kitchen. I got scolded for sorting the recycling improperly; for worrying aloud about the tall step into her dining room. Things were growing tense but holding at kind enough through gritted teeth. My mention of a shower chair blew everything to pieces.

Who Doesn’t Like a Good Sandwich?

If you’re in your 40s or 50s, you may be in the sandwich generation. More than half of Americans in their 40s have a parent 65-plus and a kid they’re still financially supporting, per a 2022 Pew study. The AARP and Huntington Bank report that nearly 30 percent of caregivers nationwide are doing both jobs at once, and a staggering 72 percent have cut back on food or medical care—or raided their retirement savings—to keep both generations afloat.

These arrangements are as much financial as emotional. Assisted living in San Diego runs a median of $6,820 a month—more than $81,000 a year—before memory care, which adds another 20 to 40 percent. For most people, that’s insurmountable. Modifying or redesigning a home can often be the preferable, affordable solution.

It’s Not Aging in Place. It’s Universal Design.

Beppie Mostert of Living Design Interiors specializes in aging in place, sustainability, and universal design—an expertise she came by personally. Her mother was diagnosed in her early 60s with an incurable disease that chipped away at her mobility. “She couldn’t cope in her own home,” Mostert tells me, “and she was determined not to leave.” Researching how people actually stay put, Mostert incorporated what she learned into her design career. “When you address the individual’s needs, that’s aging in place. When you address everybody’s needs, that’s universal design.”

One of Mostert’s clients bought her Scripps Ranch home shortly before an accident, after which she began using a wheelchair full-time. Over two decades, Mostert has adapted the home piece by piece—most recently adding an elevator. By turning “multiple-level living into single-level living” structures, a home becomes suitable to whomever is in it.

For another client who remodeled a bathroom, Mostert raised and expanded a window for natural light, ditched a sunken tub in favor of a zero-threshold, doorless shower, and added rollout shelving and a lazy Susan in the vanity. “I didn’t design for a part of their life,” she says. “I designed for their entire life.”

The Decisions San Diegans Are Making

San Diego County is aging fast: The 60-and-over population is projected to cross a million by 2040, with more than 100,000 residents over 85. Currently, the number of seniors experiencing stress due to housing costs has gone up 16 percent in a year; homelessness among those 55-plus is up 5 percent.

Aside from having, you know, a decent life and secure housing, what most of us want as we face our later years is simple: to remain independent and in our own homes as long as possible. Getting old is a privilege and staying healthy is, too. Nearly everyone will experience some form of disability in our lifetime, whether acute (like a fractured heel) or chronic (like multiple sclerosis). Per CDC data, disability prevalence nearly doubles, from roughly 24 to 44 percent, between early adulthood and age 65-plus.

Karen Newell falls into this latter group. Health conscious her entire life and previously active (she met her husband, David Ciccone, through a race-walking club), she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease about five years ago. “There’s this term, ‘temporarily abled,’” she says, explaining that being able-bodied is not a given. “Unless something drastic happens, we’re all pretty much going to be disabled at some point.”

Because Newell’s mother had Parkinson’s and her brother has it, too, Newell and Ciccone started altering their home around any anticipatory future diagnosis. They’ve since worked in stages with the help of Kaminskiy Design and Remodeling.

Operations manager Kimberly Villa speaks of the collaborative process and what she calls value engineering: “We always [say], as this is a partnership, ‘Let us know what you’re able to invest, and we’ll let you know what’s possible for that investment.’” It’s part of why clients often build in phases.

At one point, Newell and Ciccone considered selling. Pacific Beach homes tend to be small, and their existing footprint didn’t accommodate what Newell might eventually need. But they loved the location—close to services, close to the life they’d built—so instead of leaving, they decided to build around staying.

Compelled by watching her mother’s disease progression, the couple began by altering the front steps of their 1952 Pacific Beach bungalow into what is essentially a slight incline. Ciccone modeled them after the patio stairs at the Hotel del Coronado, which he measured to make sure those leading to their front door were low, long, and shallow. Parkinson’s comes with “on” and “off” times, and “off” times make even gentle steps hard to trust, so they recently added a railing. In the kitchen, the couple kept the original footprint but widened its U-shape to 5 feet instead of the standard 3 or 4—room enough, she says, to get a walker or a wheelchair all the way around if it ever comes to that. And Kaminskiy is working with them on a garage conversion.

Building Ahead of Need

Jen Pinto, principal designer at Jackson Design & Remodeling, works with clients planning for the future.

“She wanted everything flexible and catered to that aging-in-place mindset,” Pinto says of client Frankie Hebert, who moved to Carlsbad from the Bay Area in 2012. “Her husband [had been] sick, and she saw how challenging it was to care for him. When she had the opportunity to remodel, it was something she did on her own.”

Hebert and her late husband, Bob Twaddle, had talked for years about remodeling. It was the kind of dreamy discussion that stays theoretical—until it isn’t. Bob’s melanoma, which had been in remission, came back in 2017, and even a shower threshold turned dangerous. “There was no place to put a grab bar,” Herbert says. “So I would take showers with him because I was afraid he’d fall.” It wasn’t realistic to endure construction during that time, but after Twaddle died, Hebert took a year and then, with Pinto’s help, created her future home in her current one.

The result of Pinto’s work is a dream home fit for any person with a heartbeat. Every cabinet is a pull-out. Grab bars in her mermaid-tiled bathroom are shaped like ocean waves because Hebert “is kind of a beachy person.” Zero-threshold shower, no flooring transitions, and—for her cockapoo, Molly—a nook under the counter with her doggie bowls and her food and medicines in a soft-close drawer just above it. “I didn’t want my house to look like somebody old lives here,” she says.

When I ask Hebert what she would say to people struggling with adapting spaces for their comfort, she’s compassionate: “Whether you want to do it all at one time or you want to just take baby steps and do some things that are bothering you… maybe that’s where you start: You just say, ‘Okay, let’s make this a little easier.’”

Three Generations, One Roof

Marlene Smay-Jones moved into her mother’s house in Imperial Beach in 2015. Carmen Smay-Parks had owned the house since the mid-1990s, and leaving was never on the table. “That pride of ownership is still strong,” Smay-Jones says. “There’s just no reason to [leave].”

Married and used to sailing for months at a time with her husband (who, improbably, lives on a boat), becoming her mother’s roommate was meant to be temporary but quietly became permanent. “I’m like, okay, I’ll room with my mom until I’m ready to leave,” she says. “Well, when I was ready, I couldn’t anymore.”

She needed solutions that would allow her to be with her husband and also make sure her mother was secure and thriving. So she hired Kaminskiy and began remodeling in two phases: an ADU built with flexibility in mind—Smay-Jones’ youngest daughter lives there now, but it’s suitable for a permanent caregiver should one be needed; and a bathroom carved from two small bedrooms so Carmen, now 87, wouldn’t cross the house at night with her cane.

What the remodels bought wasn’t just safety. It was space—for her daughter to afford San Diego, for Smay-Jones to sail with her husband again, and for Carmen to be in her own house. Wins all around.

My own mother still zip-switches through her kitchen these days, no grab bar in sight (though, if there were one, you’d never know it as the sleek designs don’t look like your average hospital grab bar). But when that day comes, I already know what she’ll want: A design that meets all her needs, reflects who she is, and allows her to enjoy her independence with dignity.

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