I had a great conversation last week with Shelly Rosenberg, of Acorn and Oak in Dallas.
Shelly is an interior designer who is passionate about designing spaces that support families and kids of all abilities, making sure that access and ease of use are first and foremost in her designs. Her energy is contagious, and I am so impressed by her commitment and advocacy. She was headed to High Point to speak about her work last weekend, and I wish I could have made a detour to go and listen. (I was visiting colleges with my daughter in less than spring like weather. . .)
Earlier in the week, I listened to Maria Shriver’s Radically Reframing Aging Summit, which was so informative and I can’t wait to parse the conversations here in this space. One of her guests, Dan Buettner, author of Blue Zones, said the following in a panel discussion.
“The second most dangerous year of your life—the first most dangerous year of your life, in general, is the year you’re born because of infant mortality. The second most dangerous year of your life is the year you retire. There’s some very noticeable spike in mortality that year. So anything you can do, or public policy can do, to at least ease the abruptness, or taper out of the full-time workweek and into something where you’re still engaging your strength, you’re still doing what you love to do, you’re still making a meaningful conversation, It’s so clear that that contributes not only to quality of life, but quantity of life.”
As Shelly and I were talking about the overlap in our work, designing homes that families can live in as long as they want to be able to live in them, I remembered Dan Buettner’s comments.
In short, we don’t have to, nor should we have to, retire fully from our work lives, and as Shelly aptly pointed out, so why should we have to retire from our homes?
The truth is we don’t.
We design houses that our clients can live in comfortably when they have grandkids come to spend the weekend, when they need to rehab a skiing injury, when they start a consulting business from home, or when they decide they want to spend more time traveling rather than doing yard work. This is not a conversation meant solely for folks in their seventies; it’s a conversation we have with all of our clients, regardless of their age. Our mission is to help families live longer in homes they love.
Call us. We’d love to help.
