Home + community
Private living, shared rooms, outdoor areas, family visits, and social spaces organized to feel residential rather than institutional.
Senior living + assisted living
Residential dignity joined with operational clarity.
Senior living and assisted living architecture in Los Angeles and Southern California, informed by residential experience, accessibility, operations, and durable design.
Why this matters
A senior living environment is both a home and an operating system. It must support dignity, familiarity, safety, staff work, family visits, and community life together.
Apel Design brings residential sensitivity and multifamily discipline to senior living and assisted living. The work begins with the lives inside the plan: how residents arrive, orient themselves, move, gather, find privacy, receive care, and remain connected to light and landscape.
The studio also recognizes the operational side of the building: staff circulation, service, durable materials, oversight, maintenance, and the repeated daily patterns that determine whether a place works well over time.
Capabilities
What the work requires.
Clarity + accessibility
Legible circulation, thresholds, lighting, spatial cues, and accessible planning considered as part of the architecture.
Operations + durability
Staff, service, maintenance, material performance, and daily operating patterns brought into planning conversations.
Site + neighborhood
Arrival, outdoor life, privacy, scale, and the building's relationship to its surrounding community.
Selected evidence
Experience you can see.
The work below comes directly from our portfolio. We identify projects by name and city or neighborhood where appropriate; private street addresses are not published.
A residential example used to discuss senior living, assisted living, and neighborhood-scale housing.
A second West Hollywood residential reference for the senior living and assisted living practice.
Multifamily planning experience relevant to circulation, shared space, privacy, and residential identity.
Designing for who lives here
The building has to work for a body and a mind that are changing.
Senior living is one of the few building types where the design either supports independence or quietly removes it. These are the conditions the plan has to answer.
Mobility and falls
A walker needs turning room a plan drawn for able bodies does not provide. Falls cluster at thresholds, in bathrooms, and on the first step of a stair. Level transitions, generous clear floor space beside the bed and toilet, blocking in the walls for grab bars whether or not they are installed on day one, and handrails that continue past the last tread all reduce that risk before any equipment is specified.
Vision and light
A person of eighty needs roughly three times the light a person of twenty needs to read the same page, and recovers from glare far more slowly. That argues for higher ambient levels, layered rather than single-source lighting, matte finishes, contrast at stair nosings and door frames, and daylight controlled so a corridor does not swing from bright to dim as someone walks it.
Hearing and acoustics
Age-related hearing loss makes background noise disproportionately disabling. Hard, reverberant dining rooms and lounges are the most common complaint in senior communities and the easiest to prevent: absorptive ceilings, soft floor finishes where safe, separation between noisy service functions and conversation spaces, and rooms sized so speech carries without amplification.
Cognition and wayfinding
Residents living with memory loss navigate by landmark, not by sign. Repetitive corridors with identical doors are actively disorienting. Short sightlines to a recognizable destination, variation in colour and material at decision points, looped circulation without dead ends, and secured outdoor space that can be reached without a staff escort all support independence rather than restricting it.
Dignity and autonomy
The difference between housing and an institution is usually control. A door that closes, a window a resident can open, a place to display their own things, a bathroom that does not announce itself as clinical, and a route to the garden that does not require asking permission. These are planning decisions, not decorating decisions.
The social gradient
People need graduated choice between solitude and company. A plan that offers only a private room or a large communal hall forces an uncomfortable decision. The useful middle is the alcove off the corridor, the small sitting area for four, the porch at the building edge: places to be near others without being obliged to participate.
Care levels and licensing
Independent living, assisted living, memory care and skilled nursing carry different licensing requirements, staffing ratios and physical standards in California. The plan has to accommodate the licensing category the operator intends to pursue, and ideally the transition between levels, so residents are not forced to move out as their needs change.
Staff and operations
Every hour staff spend walking is an hour not spent with residents. Sightlines from stations, travel distances to the furthest room, service routes that do not cross resident living areas, and adequate space for medication, laundry, refuse and deliveries determine whether a building is pleasant to work in and therefore whether it retains staff.
Wellness centres
Health environments that do not feel like a clinic.
Wellness, therapy and outpatient buildings carry real clinical requirements and a real obligation not to feel institutional. Both have to be designed for.
What a wellness centre has to do
Wellness, therapy and outpatient environments sit between healthcare and hospitality. They carry clinical requirements for hygiene, equipment, privacy and accessibility, but a clinical atmosphere undermines the reason people come. The design has to satisfy the first without producing the second.
Clinical planning
Treatment rooms, consultation space, changing and shower facilities, equipment clearances, hand-washing, waste handling and the separation of clean and soiled routes all shape the plan before finishes are considered.
Privacy and arrival
People arriving for therapy or treatment do not want to be seen from the street or from a waiting room. Entry sequence, sightlines, acoustic separation between rooms, and a discreet route from reception to treatment matter more here than in almost any other building type.
Movement and therapy space
Physical therapy, hydrotherapy, gyms and movement studios need floor area, ceiling height, floor construction, drainage and ventilation that are difficult to add later. They are structural decisions, not fit-out decisions.
Why this work, and why us
Architecture informed by clinical practice and lived experience.
Apel Design performs architecture in association with Michael B. Maclaren, AIA, a registered nurse for more than thirty years alongside his work as an architect.
That matters because he has worked inside hospitals and medical offices as a clinician, not only drawn them. He knows what a treatment room needs at the moment it is being used, why a corridor width that satisfies the code can still fail when two people move a patient, and which of the things a plan shows as adequate turn out not to be at three in the morning. Clinical requirements arrive in the design as working knowledge rather than as a specification handed over by someone else.
His understanding of accessibility is equally direct. Michael brings a lifetime of direct personal experience with accessibility and disability. That experience makes the difference between a space that technically complies and a space a person can actually use plainly visible, in a way no code section conveys. Accessible design here is not a checklist applied at the end. It is the starting assumption, tested against how people really move through a building.
The result is that clinical requirements, accessibility and dignity are resolved together at plan stage, by someone who has lived on both sides of the drawing.
- Registered nurse, thirty-plus years
- A lifetime of direct personal experience with accessibility
- Licensed architect of record on Apel Design projects
- Healthcare, senior living, memory care and wellness environments
Accessibility + ADA
Accessible design is a planning decision, not a checklist at the end.
Accessibility requirements shape circulation, unit plans, bathroom dimensions, door swings and site approach. Resolved early they are nearly invisible. Resolved late they are expensive and obvious.
Beyond minimum compliance
Accessibility codes set a floor, not a design standard. A bathroom can satisfy every dimensional requirement and still be difficult for a resident with limited grip strength or unilateral weakness. The useful question is not whether it passes, but whether the person who lives there can use it unassisted.
Which standard applies
California projects may be governed by the California Building Code accessibility provisions, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Fair Housing Act accessibility requirements for covered multifamily dwellings, depending on the building type, funding and use. Establishing which apply, and where they conflict, belongs at the start of design.
Adaptable and universal design
Adaptable units allow a bathroom or kitchen to be modified for a wheelchair user without structural work: blocking already in the walls, removable base cabinets, clearances already present. Universal design goes further and makes the standard condition usable by the widest range of people, which usually costs nothing if decided early and a great deal if decided late.
Accessible routes and entry
Approach, parking, arrival and entry are where accessibility most often fails in practice. Slope, cross-slope, landing dimensions, door opening force and threshold height determine whether someone using a wheelchair arrives at the front door with everyone else or is routed to a service entrance.
How we work
A clear path through complexity.
Listen
Define resident profiles, care model, operations, family experience, site, and program.
Plan
Connect living, community, outdoor, staff, service, and support functions.
Humanize
Use proportion, daylight, material, art, landscape, and familiar spatial cues to create a sense of home.
Coordinate
Align the design with consultants, ownership, operators, technical requirements, and delivery.
A strong fit for
Teams looking for design intelligence and practical clarity.
- Senior living owners and operators
- Assisted living developers
- Affordable senior housing teams
- Property owners evaluating residential care uses
- Out-of-state operators entering Southern California
Questions
Useful answers before we begin.
What actually makes senior living design different from multifamily?
The residents. Ageing changes mobility, vision, hearing and sometimes cognition, and each of those has architectural consequences: turning clearances, light levels, acoustic separation and legible wayfinding. A well-planned apartment building is not automatically a well-planned senior community.
How early do accessibility requirements need to be resolved?
At plan stage. Clear floor space, door swings, bathroom dimensions and accessible route grades determine the plan itself. Applying them afterwards usually means losing area, relocating walls, or accepting a compromised result.
Can a building accommodate residents as their care needs increase?
It depends on the licensing category the operator pursues and how the plan is organized. Designing so a resident can move between levels of care without leaving the community is a deliberate decision that has to be made early, and it is not possible in every regulatory scenario.
How does design affect staffing?
Travel distance and sightlines determine how much of a caregiver's shift is spent walking. Shorter routes from stations to rooms, service circulation that avoids resident areas, and adequate back-of-house space all reduce the operational cost of running the building.
What is the difference between accessible, adaptable and universal design?
Accessible means meeting the applicable code requirements. Adaptable means the unit can be modified later without structural work because the blocking and clearances are already there. Universal design means the standard condition works for the widest range of people without modification.
How is senior living design different from conventional multifamily design?
Senior living must combine residential character with accessibility, orientation, staff workflows, service, safety, family visits, and a care or operating model. Those relationships need to be considered from the first planning studies.
Why is residential design experience relevant?
Residents still experience the building as home. Privacy, daylight, material, scale, outdoor connection, and familiar domestic cues remain essential even when operations are more complex.
Where does Apel Design pursue senior living work?
The Malibu studio focuses on Los Angeles County and Southern California, including West Hollywood and surrounding communities.
Related capability
Accessibility and clinical knowledge run through all of this work.
Healthcare, senior living, affordable and multifamily projects share the same requirements: accessible routes, usable bathrooms, adaptable units and buildings that work for people whose needs change. The architect of record on our projects has been a registered nurse for over thirty years.