Breakfast in bed, a
spa treatment, pre-lunch cocktails and canapes, a little light shopping, a
gourmet dinner, the chauffeur to take you to the opera — welcome to Chelsea
Court Place, a home for people with dementia... and lots of money.
It’s a spectacular —
if almost entirely unattainable — example of a growing trend for a new kind of
upmarket lifestyle for the old and very wealthy.
From swish granny
flats with resident medical staff to retirement homes providing bespoke care
for people with dementia, retirement professionals have realised that the
baby-boomer generation don’t want to give up the good things in life when they
get old.
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From swish granny
flats with resident medical staff to retirement homes providing bespoke care
for people with dementia, retirement professionals have realised that the
baby-boomer generation don’t want to give up the good things in life when they
get old
And an entirely new
industry is springing up to cater for those lucky enough to be able to pay for
it. In Chelsea Court Place rooms cost up to £156,000 a year.
Luxury developments
like these house rich retirees who are used to first-class food, wine and attentive
service, and who don’t see why they should have to make compromises when they
get older.
Fitted out by top
interior designers and staffed by private nurses, these are places which offer
a gin and tonic before lunch and a hydrotherapy treatment before dinner.
Not for them what the
rest of us have to put up with for our parents or ourselves: scruffy care homes
staffed by underpaid, unhappy care workers, too rushed off their feet to treat
residents properly. Then there are the horror stories of neglect and abuse.
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And it’s not even as
if it’s cheap — a bed in a nursing home at the lower end of the market can
easily cost £40,000 a year.
But before you blanch
at the notion of millionaire care, there is a glimmer of good news. Could it be
that these upmarket homes may herald a new way of thinking that could benefit
us all?
For now let’s take a
closer look at the 15-bed Chelsea Court Place in London. Here the residents
(they prefer the word ‘members’) are the sort of people used to having
housekeepers and travelling the world. They are able to pay for top-notch
service.
Fees range from
£2,000 to £3,000 a week, depending on the size of the ensuite bedroom. You
bring your own furniture (and if you like, your own interior designer). The
fees include all your care — no matter how infirm you get — from experienced
nurses.
The home’s
award-winning chef trained at the Savoy. A typical Sunday lunch menu includes
salt-baked celeriac and white truffle soup; chargrilled white asparagus and
poached duck egg; aged Aberdeen Angus rib of beef; poached lemon sole; tarte
tatin; and Earl Grey panna cotta.
It’s not surprising
that this place resembles a five-star hotel: its founder and chairman, Laurence
Geller, used to be the boss of the Hyatt Hotel group.
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He has retired and
says he now owns and runs ‘a whole series of other hotels. I’ve just opened the
Conrad Hotel in Chicago, the second most luxurious in the city. It’s not the
most luxurious: that’s the Waldorf Astoria’. He grins: ‘I own that, too.
‘My most successful
hotels have always been high luxury. If I can make Chelsea Court Place the
equivalent of one of my Four Seasons hotels, I’ll be happy.’
Glamorous fixtures
and fittings are important, of course, but Geller believes top-end luxury is
less about expensive curtains and designer chairs (though Chelsea Court Place
has plenty) and more about extraordinary service.
‘I run the sort of
hotels where, if someone loses a cufflink, you ask to borrow the other one
overnight while you look for it,’ he says. ‘By the morning you’ve had another
one made for them.’
So, at Chelsea Court
Place, if residents want a meal in the middle of the night, they can have one.
If family members want to come in and see what’s going on at 3am, they’re
welcome.
But can it really be
right to create a two-tier system with one level of care for the super-rich and
another for the rest of us?
Simon Bottery,
director of policy at Independent Age, the older people’s charity is not
convinced. ‘Of course, there is a place in the market for high-priced care
homes but people are often paying for the facilities, and the quality of care
will not necessarily increase at the same rate as the price.
‘You would expect
higher priced care homes to offer staffing levels that cheaper homes might
struggle to match, but you don’t need to pay thousands to get attentive,
compassionate care. Some of the best homes I have visited have been some of the
cheapest.’ A couple of hundred yards from Chelsea Court Place along the King’s
Road is a new development, with flats starting at an astonishing £3 million —
and an as-yet-undecided service charge on top.
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Auriens, set to open
in 2019, promises to be spacious and contemporary, courtesy of a firm of
interior designers who created the look for the flash new Beaumont Hotel in
Mayfair.
‘It’s going to be a
place, where you’ll be able to get whatever you need, from champagne and
chauffeurs to physio and medical care,’ says co-founder Karen Mulville.
‘It will feel like
hotel living. Part of the attraction is that residents can walk outside and be
on the King’s Road. This generation wants to go on being part of the world,
rather than shutting themselves off from it: to live as fully as they can for
as long as they can.’
The general
atmosphere, Mulville says, will be closer to that of a private members’ club.
Residents will be able to live independently, but medical and care services
will also be available when they need them. A short walk over Albert Bridge (or
you could take the courtesy bus) is another, similar development, Battersea
Place, where flats for the over-65s range from £650,000 to £2.95 million.
Residents can take
advantage of a spa, heated indoor pool, library, billiards room,
chauffeur-driven cars and concerts. And they can also make use of 30 purpose-built
nursing suites for convalescence, long-term nursing or palliative care.
Not all affluent
retirees want to be in the centre of the city, and the luxury later-life trend
isn’t entirely modelled on hip hotels. There’s also the country house style —
more rural and chintzy, but every bit as classy.
Chilton House, for
example, is a Georgian manor in Buckinghamshire. It’s been in the
Aubrey-Fletcher family since the 17th century and they now run it as a nursing
and convalescence home.
Lady Aubrey-Fletcher
is often in evidence — as is her son Harry.
Their presence adds
to the Downton Abbey vibe of gracious country living. All Chilton House
residents are addressed as ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’, —unless of course, they have a title
(which some do).
After breakfast in
bed, they typically meet in the front hall for coffee and conversation over the
newspapers. There are exercise classes, treatments, and chauffeurs to take
people out.
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After breakfast in
bed, they typically meet in the front hall for coffee and conversation over the
newspapers. There are exercise classes, treatments, and chauffeurs to take
people out
But there’s no
enforced jollity: it’s all very English. And if you want a cup of tea or a
glass of bubbly, you have only to ring a bell.
Rooms cost between
£1,200 and £1,600 a week. At a minimum of £62,400 a year, life at Chilton House
is far from cheap. But it is closer to the average £39,300 a year for nursing
home care (there are regional variations), an exorbitant figure that many of us
are depressingly familiar with.
As more and more of
us live for longer, very many families are facing huge bills for care and
wondering about what to do ourselves when the time comes.
Pretty much anyone
with assets has to pay for their own care. So do we ask our children to foot
the bill? If not it’s probably a question of selling our homes and using the
equity.
Even for the wealthy,
care is a difficult thing to budget for. The average stay in a care home in the
UK is around two-and-a-half years, but for some people it’s significantly
longer.
The real problem is
getting staff. Quality care requires top-quality staff, who can be hard to find
in an underpaid and demoralised profession. ‘I can solve that,’ Laurence Geller
says. ‘It may take a while, but we’ll get there.’
Crucially, Geller
says he is determined that his high-end approach will filter down, at least to
the middle classes. He may be creating a two-tier system of haves and have-nots
at the moment — but he wants a much larger group to benefit from his approach.
As financial backer
of the first ever MSc in Dementia Care in Britain, Geller intends to train more
and better staff. The new course will launch in January at the University of
West London, where he is Chancellor.
It’s fair to say
that, for him, this is personal. Both his parents had dementia. Unusually, he
has taken a DNA test — ‘and guess what? I have the strand’.
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He gave £1 million to
dementia causes last year and he leads fundraising for the Alzheimer’s Society.
‘We have to get rid of the stigma surrounding dementia,’ he says.
‘It’s much worse in
this country than in the U.S. One person gets dementia every three minutes in
the UK. In the time it takes to boil an egg! Twice as many have dementia as
cancer, yet cancer gets eight times the funding.’
He’s spending £50
million on Chelsea Court Place and in rolling out up to five more posh dementia
care homes in London.
All very well, you
might say, if you’re one of the handful of rich people who can afford the couple
of grand a week.
But Laurence Geller
insists what he’s learning at Chelsea Court Place will benefit everyone. He’s
funding an independent study of its first year of operation and the results
will be open to all.
‘It’s like fashion,’
he says, ‘what you see on the catwalks makes its way sooner or later into the
shops. I believe what we learn about dementia care by doing it in the most
luxurious way possible will be really useful.
‘I believe it can
trickle down to the middle market and make dementia care better.’
As for me, I’d rather
go up in the world as I age — now where did I put that Lottery ticket?
SOURCE: Daily Mail, Geraldine Bedell
