From Homestyle to Lifestyle

Homestyle to lifestyle shift

Part 1 of a series on the shift from institutional to lifestyle-led design in Australian retirement living.

Walk into a retirement living community built today and you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd wandered into a boutique hotel. Warm timber, considered lighting, armchairs people actually want to sit in. Walk into one built thirty years ago, and the language is different: vinyl flooring, fluorescent lighting, rows of identical chairs facing a wall-mounted television. Same purpose. Completely different message.

That shift isn't cosmetic. It's the result of a decade of mounting evidence, a Royal Commission, and a generation of incoming residents who simply won't accept what their parents accepted. Here's what's actually driving it, and where the line sits between what's required and what's just good practice.

The model we're moving away from

For much of the last century, aged care and retirement design borrowed its logic from hospitals. Long corridors built for staff efficiency. Centralised nurses' stations. Standardised rooms, standardised furniture, standardised everything, because uniformity was easier to manage, clean, and replace.

The thinking made sense from an operations standpoint. It made far less sense from a human one. Architecture and design commentators have pointed out that buildings organised around staff workflows rather than residents' lived experience tend to produce exactly the sterile, institutional feeling people fear when they picture moving into care, and that this isn't just an aesthetic problem. Research summarised by senior living architecture firm Cove notes that environments perceived as institutional can actually accelerate cognitive decline and deepen isolation, while environments built around autonomy and choice tend to preserve function and wellbeing for longer.

In other words, the building itself was quietly working against the people living in it.

What actually changed

Three things converged.

The evidence caught up. Environmental gerontology, the study of how physical surroundings affect ageing, has spent the last fifteen years building a case that design isn't neutral. A 2025 scoping review in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications traced how furniture-specific research alone has shifted from pure usability questions ("can someone safely sit in this chair") toward deeper health dimensions: cognitive performance, loneliness, satisfaction, as the field has matured. The research isn't just bigger. It's asking better questions.

The Royal Commission forced a reckoning. In Australia, the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety surfaced stories that, by their own account, painted aged care as lonely and institutionalised, overlooking residents' general wellbeing. That language is hard to read and harder to ignore for anyone working in the sector. It led directly to the National Aged Care Design Principles and Guidelines, introduced in July 2024, which set out four principles for residential aged care homes: enabling the person, cultivating a home, accessing the outdoors, and a fourth around safe, supportive design. Architecture firm Hassell, which works across the sector, has described de-institutionalisation as no longer a future ambition but already part of how they approach every project.

It's worth being precise here, because the distinction matters and gets blurred often. The National Design Principles apply formally to residential aged care homes, the regulated, higher-care end of the sector, not to retirement villages, which sit under separate state-based legislation. If you operate or design for retirement living specifically, you're not bound by them. But the principles set a benchmark and a public expectation that's now flowing through the entire sector regardless of who's technically required to follow it. Partly because many providers run both retirement living and aged care under one roof, and partly because residents who've seen what good design looks like in one setting expect it everywhere.

The residents changed. The incoming generation of retirement living residents grew up with more choice, more disposable income, and higher expectations of hospitality than any generation before them. Industry coverage from Senior Housing News has tracked operators actively moving away from the idea that senior living is only for people who need health care, building instead toward something closer to a lifestyle product people choose, not a care setting they settle for.

What "lifestyle-led" actually means

It's tempting to read this shift as purely aesthetic: swap the linoleum for timber, add some cushions, call it done. That misses the point.

A genuinely lifestyle-led space is built around a different question. Institutional design asks: how do we manage this efficiently and safely? Lifestyle-led design asks: how does someone live well here? Those questions don't always produce different answers, but they often do, and furniture sits right at the centre of where they diverge.

Consider seating. A clinical model defaults to uniform, easy-to-clean chairs arranged for staff sightlines. A lifestyle model considers that over 60% of seniors across multiple countries surveyed want the option of a reclining armchair they can adjust to their own comfort. Not because it looks nicer, but because comfort, autonomy, and dignity are bound up in something as simple as choosing how you sit.

Or consider personalisation. Research into the psychology of ageing has found that furniture used in care settings, and how it's arranged, can create an intimate environment that supports reminiscence, directly affecting residents' mental health. A room that looks like every other room doesn't just feel impersonal. It removes something residents actually need.

It's worth holding a little nuance here too. Not every study agrees that environment alone moves the needle. One mixed-methods study published in The Gerontologist found that physical environment alone wasn't statistically linked to depressive symptoms in care home residents; social interaction and a sense of autonomy mattered more. That's not a reason to dismiss design. It's a reason to get the purpose of design right. Furniture and layout matter most when they're in service of independence, choice, and connection, not as decoration layered on top.

Where this leaves retirement living

If you're designing or furnishing a retirement village rather than a regulated aged care home, you won't find your obligations spelled out in a government guideline. That can read as a gap. It's better understood as room to lead.

The sector-wide direction is clear regardless of regulation: away from spaces designed around operational convenience, toward spaces designed around how someone actually wants to live. The providers and designers getting this right aren't waiting for a mandate. They're treating the evidence and the expectations as the standard, because that's what residents and their families are now comparing every community against, whether it's regulated to or not.

This is the first in a series looking at that shift in more depth. Next, we go deeper on the part of the room residents touch the most: the furniture itself, and what the research actually says about why it matters.

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Next in this series: Furniture as therapy: the evidence behind the armchair, where we look at the specific research on seating, materials, and ergonomics in retirement settings.

Curious where your own spaces sit on the spectrum from institutional to lifestyle-led? Try our quick self-assessment below. It takes about two minutes and gives you a clear read on where to focus first.