Reimagining Aged Care Through a Best-Practice Dementia Village
As our population ages, more of us are experiencing dementia in our lives and the lives of our loved ones. In 2026, it has become the leading cause of death of Australians, and currently, there is an estimated 446,500 Australians living with the disease. Symptoms of dementia vary significantly from person to person, often presenting challenges for individuals in navigating their surroundings, socialising, and pursuing fulfilling activities. Research, and the advancements in care are providing a framework for how we can best support those living with the disease and their families, friends and communities.
Architecture offers us the opportunity to craft spaces and design the built environment to ease the lifestyle challenges faced by patients and carers. Dedicated research by individuals, organisations such as Dementia Australia, and government has contributed to the release of the National Aged Care Design Principles and Guidelines, a set of recommendations for well-informed design interventions relevant to current standards of care and support.
At ck architecture, we have always considered these core principles within our retirement living and aged care projects, however we recently had the opportunity to refine this further in the design we created for a best-practice dementia village.
Released in July 2024, the National Aged Care Design Principles and Guidelines were developed to steer both new builds and refurbishments of existing facilities away from the clinical, institutional model that has long defined residential aged care, towards something more accessible, dignified, and familiar to the traditional home environment.
The guidelines are structured around four core principles:
Enable the Person: support residents to live somewhere that maintains their health, wellbeing, and sense of identity.
Cultivate a Home: create a familiar environment that offers privacy, a sense of control, and belonging.
Access the Outdoors: ensure residents can see, reach, and spend time in nature.
Connect with Community: encourage ongoing connection with family, friends, and the broader community, and continued participation in meaningful activities.
These core principles distil the essential elements required to create quality aged-care facilities addressing current and future challenges and are the key motivators of our design.
Precedents
The challenges arising from an aging population are, of course, not unique to Australia. Recent times have seen a global emergence of new models designed to enhance the experience of living with dementia, providing tested precedents from which we can learn. Two such developments became reference points for both our design response and the model of care that would be provided: the Netherlands’ De Hogeweyk (2009) and France’s Village Landais Alzheimer (2020).
In the design of De Hogeweyk, the two-storey buildings wrap around a series of interconnected courtyards, linked overhead on the upper level with pedestrian bridges. One of the unique and central aspects of the project is the way these buildings are arranged internally into a series of intimate households. Each household hosts around six residents who share living, cooking, and outdoor spaces, creating an environment reminiscent of domestic homes, and in striking contrast to standard models consisting of long corridors flanked by countless bedrooms. The households of these shared courtyards join to create a ‘neighbourhood’, which in turn joins with other ‘neighbourhoods’ on the property to form a ‘village’. In doing so, the design has taken what would typically have been conceived as a health facility and transformed it into a welcoming home for residents.
The second precedent, Village Landais Alzheimer, also offers a design in contrast to a traditional health facility. Completed in 2020 and set on a generous site in the south of France, Landais uses a domestic scale of single-storey buildings with timber cladding and terracotta roofs. As with De Hogeweyk, households are clustered around communal courtyards to form a series of neighbourhoods. In this instance, the whole “village” forms around a central pond, with extensive perimeter gardens and even a few resident donkeys.
In both cases, villagers are encouraged to wander the grounds, socialise, and keep an active role in running their own lives through grocery shopping, cooking, and various other everyday services and amenities. The designs give casual prompts to draw villagers through the layered spaces, offering clear paths to destinations and engagement that feel readily accessible and, crucially, spontaneous. Despite delivering promising outcomes, projects of this calibre remain rare, with only a dozen or so appearing around the world.
Our Design Response
As we commenced the design process, we acknowledged the complex scope required a solid understanding of complementary architectural models in alignment with real world experience from carers and their organisations. We were fortunate to have partnered with a care provider deeply engaged with these evolving practices and best-case models, some of whom had visited several of the aforementioned sites firsthand. During the process we also worked directly with Kirsty Bennett of Evoke Collective, an expert in aged care design, who has contributed directly to the best-practice care research here in Australia.
Our process began with direct consultation with these carers and specialists. It was important for us to engage with people who understand the practicalities of running a successful dementia service and what a ‘good day’ looks like for a patient and their community. Inspired by Dementia Australia’s ‘day in the life’ case studies, we mapped how a typical day might unfold for a resident within our model: the rhythm of waking, eating, wandering, cooking, gardening, socialising, and resting. This kept us focused on designing for the individuals; constantly considering physical accessibility, sensory comfort, orientation, and emotional wellbeing.
In practical terms, our design featured twelve households arranged across two neighbourhoods, sharing a communal village square and amenities including a café, kiln, hairdresser, wellness centre, and hall. Importantly, many of these amenities were also intended to be open to the public, inviting the local community to engage with and embrace the village as a part of the neighbourhood, rather than a facility set apart from it. Crucially, these amenities and services are included to support the real lives of the residents, not merely as window dressings, with their inclusion and planning specified to support accessibility and independence.
To achieve best outcomes, we distributed the program via a series of ‘welcoming destinations’, connected by clearly legible paths which lower the effort for participation at every opportunity. This offered a gentle unveiling of safe experiences over the site, taking the resident from the privacy of one’s own bedroom; through personalised alcoves; into intimate household living rooms; their private front garden; the neighbourhood courtyard; and eventually meeting community at the village gardens and square. Residents are given the opportunity to explore at their own pace, without ever feeling lost or overwhelmed.
Looking Ahead
Architecture is constantly offering solutions to lifestyle challenges, and we were thrilled to have been given the opportunity to explore this evolving model in our design. We appreciate that research and new service options will keep the sector in motion in terms of delivery and execution, and we are committed to developing our approach to it. We are invested in design that offers real support to residents, their families, carers and care providers and we look forward to further listening and learning to contribute to best practice facilities and communities, now and into the future.
