According to an Dutch idea, older people need on-site restaurants, bars, village squares and beauty parlours. Is the UK is ready for a revolution in care home design? Imagine an older people’s care home that proudly goes by the motto: “Too much care is worse than too little care.” Imagine a care home with regular disco nights, film screenings, cash machines, a beauty parlour, hairdressers, a museum, a sculpture garden, a restaurant teeming with sugary treats such as apple pies and double chocolate puddings, and an on-site bar freely licensed to serve as much alcohol at it likes. No, this isn’t some surreal septuagenarian Willy Wonka-esque dream, it is in fact an innovative and - perhaps unsurprisingly – highly popular brand of care(free) home in the Netherlands that, to date, houses up to 6,000 people. The Humanitas Apartments for Life were set up by charismatic multimillionaire Dr Hans Becker in 1995. Initially opening in Rotterdam with 350 apartments in three complexes, the organisation has since grown to incorporate 3,000 apartments scattered over 30 sites across the Netherlands and has an annual turnover of £86m. Becker’s model has the explicit support of the Dutch government and even the former Dutch queen, and similar versions have been implemented as far afield as Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The 12-storey, 195-unit Humanitas Bergweg project in Rotterdam by EGM Architecten (1995) is a classic example of the Humanitas housing model. The ‘village square’ at its centre acts as the complex’s recreational hub. The concept behind Apartments for Life is as simple as it is revolutionary. Becker passionately rejects the West’s “cure and care” approach to housing older people as a destructive and debilitating institutional obsession that focuses undue attention on “handicaps and medical and hygienic problems.” According to Becker, “there is not much to cure when someone has Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s” and “constant attenuation of medical issues will cause what is left of a [person’s] positive image to disappear.”......(source: Buiding.co.uk)