Days of Wine and ...
Today's active-adult communities appeal to aging boomers with spas, hiking trails—even vineyards
Maureen Christiansen is looking forward to learning how to play bocce and is hoping to find a group to teach her bridge, too. She wants to improve her swimming, get out on some vineyard-rimmed walking trails with her husband, Edward, and maybe play more golf. Her husband is excited about attending cooking classes and wine tastings.
No, it's not their next cruise or resort vacation, but if it sounds that way, well, that's just the point. The Christiansens, 60 and 64, respectively, recently bought a home at Trilogy at the Vineyards, an active-adult community built just for baby boomers about an hour eastof San Francisco. Homes there range in price from just over $600,000 to nearly $900,000 and in size from 1,750 to 2,900 square feet. The couple's stylish two-bedroom home will be finished by early fall, and Maureen estimates that in October they'll begin a new phase in their lives by moving all of 20 minutes away from where they live now, still close to their grown sons and to Edward's job with Wells Fargo in Walnut Creek, a San Francisco Bay area suburb.
Cafe society. Welcome to what developers hope is the new face of housing for maturing baby boomers. Active-adult communities are by now an old idea, but developers have been puzzling over how to make them appeal to boomers. They think they've finally found the magic formula: location-specific, "resort style" communities like Trilogy. They're often far from the Sun Belt and are built to evoke the lifestyle associated with their surroundings in California wine country, Colorado ski country, or even the outskirts of Chicago or Washington, D.C. These communities aim to give boomers even more convenience, luxury, and fun than they thought they wanted in their later years by offering yoga, walking trails, high-speed computer access, guest speakers, day spas, chic cafes, and wine bars—all at their doorsteps.
"If you say active-adult community to boomers, they think retirement community, and they resist it," says Dan O'Brien, president of Trilogy's northern California division. "But we hope if they hear about us, they'll be curious enough to check it out, and that when they get here, the whole community will just look good and feel good to them."
The Christiansens hadn't thought about living in such a place at all until their son mentioned playing golf on a nice course at another Trilogy development about an hour north of where they lived. They drove up out of idle curiosity, Maureen says, and pretty quickly "drank the Kool-Aid."
The community was orderly but stopped short of being too cookie cutter. They saw the chance to downsize to a smaller home and yard while still living in a house with upscale amenities like a gourmet kitchen. With the wide social networks they had at the peak of their work and family lives dwindling, they liked being able to build a new social circle with people their age. "And we liked that everything was right there, and there was a lot of stuff going on," she says.
advertisement
