Katie McCamant & Chuck Durrett won a Silver Award for Best of of Senior Living from the National Association of Home Builders on Tuesday according to various articles and a press release.
Nevada City architects, McCamant and Durrett’s design for Silver Sage Village, a senior cohousing project in Boulder, Colorado, received the Silver Award for Best of Senior Living. Competing against hundreds of firms across America, the NAHB rated McCamant and Durrett’s design as one of the country’s best senior housing. Firm principal Charles Durrett was on hand to receive the award, “We are excited to see our ideas become working realities in communities shaped by residents, like Silver Sage.”
Silver Sage Village cohousing is part of a trend towards less conventional solutions for aging with independence within communities, or as architect Charles Durrett so aptly puts it “the challenge of aging non-institutionally.” Durrett coined the term cohousing – people buying homes in a community they plan and run together – for the type of communities he experienced as an architecture student in Denmark during the 1980’s. America may be more ready than ever to consider cohousing’s benefits, which include about 25% to 50% less driving, 75% less land used for housing, and at least 80% less energy used.
A recent article on McCamant and Durret also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle a few days before the award was announced where Durret speaks to the issue of senior cohousing:
Two years ago my follow-up book, “Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living,” came out. In research, I kept asking them, ‘Why are you bothering with this? You’re 60 or 70 years old.’ I marveled at the answers. People talked about things like, ‘I’m not going to just sit here in this house and be bored and lonely and curate my furniture. I want to have fun.’
This month, we’re starting construction for a 30-unit senior cohousing project in Grass Valley. One of the reasons I like working with seniors is that they are so much more impatient. These seniors tell me all the time, ‘Hey Chuck. I don’t even buy green bananas anymore. Let’s make this thing happen.”
Read the article on McCamant andd Durret in the Sand Francisco Chronicle.
