“These integrated senior residences [IRCs] “We want to bridge the gap between the family home and the care home,” says Tom Scaife, head of senior living at Knight Frank. “I visit so many 80-year-olds who are living in one room of their London townhouse because they can’t manage the stairs. We’re failing a generation if we don’t give them another option before it’s too late.”
Scaife says Battersea Place, which opened in 2016, was the first high-end senior housing in London. They sold for £1 million each and the site is now full and there is a waiting list. “Since then, many IRCs have sprung up across London and the Home Counties in a relatively short space of time. ARCO, the organisation representing the IRC sector in the UK, says it wants to see a senior housing community in every borough.”
Nick Sanderson is founder and CEO of the Audley Group, whose first London project – Nightingale Place in Clapham – opened in 2020. It’s more of a private members’ club than a retirement home. Two-thirds of the apartments, which cost from £750,000, have now sold. Sanderson says the typical buyer is selling a “4, 5 or 6 bedroom family home” to move in and enjoy hydrotherapy, opera performances, a gym and an on-site cinema.
“When I started Audley in the 1990s, the mindset of customers was very different to that of today’s 77-year-olds (the average age for moving into a retirement home),” he says. “This generation grew up in the 1960s, they’ve travelled the world, they’ve got a university education, they’re part of the technological revolution and they have a great lifestyle. They’re fit and active and they’re not ready to accept the pain of ageing.”
Sanderson, who recently served as part of the government’s taskforce on housing for older people, says Heythrop College is a “frustrating site”. Surprisingly, given that it would have been a direct competitor to Audley, he says it’s a shame it’s not going ahead. “It would be better for us if there were more quality retirement homes,” he says. “People still have this image of a miserable care home in their heads and they doubt that a place like ours can exist. So the more people see it, the more they will believe it.”
Despite the proliferation of luxury retirement homes, the UK lags behind the US, New Zealand and Australia, where the sector is considered a thriving part of the hospitality industry. In the UK, 0.6 per cent of people aged 65 and over live in retirement homes, compared to just 6 per cent in the US.
So what went wrong at Heythrop College? It took Zenoprop 15 months to get planning permission because of concerns about the amount of affordable housing on the site, and in August 2023 the developers asked the local authority for permission to delay their commitment to build five affordable homes on the site, arguing that inflation had made the project a “financial burden”. They were eventually forced to sell in late 2023. This is just the latest twist on a site that already has an interesting history. The Victorian building was previously owned by French nuns and was a convent school called The Maria Assumpta Centre for decades. In 1993 the Jesuit school Heythrop College moved in (which had been located at Heythrop Hall in Oxfordshire since 1926), offering ecclesiastical qualifications as well as degrees from the University of London’s faculties of philosophy, theology and social sciences.
But in 2018, the Jesuits closed the college due to recruitment difficulties, rising costs and “changes in government funding”. It was the first major British higher education institution to close completely since the dissolution of the original University of Northampton in 1265. The college’s 150,000-book library – considered one of the finest theological and philosophical collections in the country – has been moved to Senate House. So what’s next for the vacant Heythrop College? Most likely a luxury hotel. Arora, who now owns the site, specialises in airport hotels such as the Sofitel at Heathrow and Gatwick, so perhaps the venue could still take off, even if plans for a burgeoning retirement village are currently on hold.
KPF and Arora declined to comment; Zenoprop or Auriens did not respond to requests for comment.