New wellness amenities, a Center for Healthy Living and new independent living offerings are just a few of the ways Plymouth Place, a life plan community in La Grange, Illinois, revitalized its campus.

With the project – spurred on by rising local competition and the wants and needs of the baby boomer generation – the operator transformed the community from an aging property to one equipped with better dining, a more modern wellness program and housing options to meet demands of new incoming consumers.

Planning with residents and local stakeholders were the lynchpin to the effort, according to AG Architecture Chief Design Officer Eric Harmann. As part of the process, the project team undertook a comprehensive market study, oversaw a strategic planning process and brought on a developer as a consultant.

The end result marries traditional design elements with modern wellness-forward design and amenities, and won Plymouth Place the top spot in the 2024 Senior Housing News Architecture and Design Awards’ Best Campus Repositioning category.

The concept

Planning for Plymouth Place’s renovations began toward the end of 2019. The project team included architectural firm AG Architecture, with Spellman Brady & Company as interior designer and Eventus Strategic Partners as development manager..

In addition to undertaking a market study and strategic planning process, the project team gathered feedback from residents, staff and family members,; local leadership and people living in the surrounding area of La Grange.

The project team then held a two-day meeting to determine their end project.

“They had a desire to grow and have a product that was distinctly different from their existing tower,” Harmann told Senior Housing News. “[They had] an understanding the new senior was going to want a slightly different lifestyle, different amenities than what they could currently offer.”

The designs called for integrating the campus with the surrounding Villages of La Grange and La Grange Park. To do so, the design draws inspiration from the Chicago area’s signature brownstone and row house residential typologies, allowing for a different look and feel of the campus’s eight story Georgian tower.

The restructured plan also allows for varying height villa structures and ample green space that unifies the entire campus.

The design included a rooftop garden space that gave residents above the first floor a courtyard space – something that isn’t found in every senior living community, Harmann said.

The project team prioritized remodeling commons on campus to show residents it wasn’t forgotten in the expansion process. Residents could preview the remodeled dining venues, marketplace and salons, and these renovations eventually became connecting points for the main campus and the addition, making the development easier due to its phased approach.

Some challenges arose translating the community’s design into the finished product, and Harmann noted there were a lot of back-and-forth conversations in the planning stage.

Other challenges included ground water in the area that prevented digging on the site deeper than four feet and led to the design team striking a basement from the original design and instead planning for four freestanding buildings, each with elevator access to a shared parking lot.

The construction

Workers with Pepper Construction kicked off on the renovation in mid-2020. Workers first remodeled the community’s interiors and built new independent living villas and the Center for Healthy Living after that.

Because of the master planning efforts that were undertaken with “everybody on board,” including contractor Pepper Construction and interior designer Spellman Brady and Company, the project team completed the repositioning project ahead of schedule.

AG Architects completed documentation for the next phase of renovations while workers were completing the initial renovation, which aided in the process.

“We didn’t go through a process where we completed full documentation of every iteration of the phase where we would have, or we would have had to have waited for one completed set of documents,” Hermann said. “So we broke things up into three smaller projects in our office, which also support the contractor sequencing as well.”

Workers also during construction shifted the independent living villas 30 feet north to preserve a 130-year-old tree. The tree was also preserved in a metaphorical sense by serving as inspiration for the name of the community’s restaurant in its new Center for Healthy Living, 30 North.

In the end, construction wrapped up three months earlier than expected, with the project’s cost coming in below its overall construction budget of $69.2 million.

The completion

Plymouth Place’s renovations were officially completed April 30, 2024, ahead of schedule and coming in under its total budget of $85 million.

The project team measured the project’s success in how it exceeded its financial goals in pre-sales, accelerated lease-up to now-full occupancy, favorable construction costs and its shortened completion schedule.

In the end, Harmann said landscaping and exterior design work was crucial to make the community ready for residents to move in.

“It’s one thing to see the units come together, but it’s another to see the experience that a resident can have walking out onto their balcony,” Harmann said. “A lot of times the exterior space is a second thought. But in this instance, they had all of the amenities and full landscaping when they moved in.”

As a testament to that success, the community plans to add more villas in another phase of construction in either fall or winter of 2025, with a growing waitlist for the offering.

Judges were particularly impressed with the outdoor amenities included in the repositioning, with Judge LuAnn Holec noting they “provide so many opportunities for residents to enjoy the outdoor spaces.”

Judge Bruce Hurowitz noted he was impressed with the campus expansion, particularly the “very creative connections to the existing [campus].”

Judge Greg Gauthreaux added the material palette chosen for the repositioning “refreshes aesthetic while maintaining connection to legacy buildings,” and the “interior spaces are fresh and modern – fun use of color and texture.”

Harmann said that AG Architects will take the experience it gained from Plymouth Place – such as building a community in a colder climate than they were used to – to its next projects.