Can the right home make you live longer?
The latest high-end real estate amenity: living longer.
At least that’s the view of South Florida real estate developer Rishi Kapoor, whose Location Ventures has begun selling units in a forthcoming development in Coral Gables that Kapoor believes will deliver the promise of a healthier home, which he says is “not just science fiction, but fact.”
The forthcoming Villa Valencia development, set to open in mid-2021, features 39 units, all offering some of the latest features of the burgeoning wellness real estate trend. The sales pitch highlights “hospital-grade air, energizing light and pollutant-free water to protect from contaminants, free radicals and aging.” Kapoor says when all is said and done, the units, which start at $1.65 million, will benefit from a “five-figure investment” per unit in air purification systems, circadian living lighting, a Savant home audio system, and the Darwin system, a new smart-home solution that monitors environmental pollutants (Delos will have over 1,000 contracted projects by the end of 2019). Residents can set alerts for certain allergens and be notified when they reach a critical level indoors, which turns on the HVAC to remediate and circulate fresh air. Along with access to landscaped rooftops and a hammam spa, the features within each unit can, according to the sales material, create a home that “makes you live longer.”
“We’re catering for a clientele, an affluent clientele, and what we want to provide—and I’m careful to say this, it’s important—we want to create the healthiest home environment possible,” he says. “What is wealth without health?”
Many buyers agree; so far, seven of the units have been sold.
Can a building really extend your life?
Villa Valencia is just the latest example of the growing and somewhat nebulous wellness real estate industry. The Miami, Florida-based Global Wellness Institute, an industry trade group, claimed in a much-cited 2018 study that it’s a $134 billion industry, growing at a rate of 6.4 percent globally a year and expected to top $180 billion by 2022.
While pitches promoting colored lighting and life extension may sound like GOOP for the Restoration Hardware set—there’s even a term, “well-washing,” for projects that dress up designs with bogus health claims—the idea of wellness as a new amenity or real estate category has gained credence due to emerging knowledge about health and air pollution, especially the indoor variety.
Studies by acclaimed researchers and stories in the New Yorker and elsewhere have highlighted the danger of living a life mostly indoors, surrounded by stale, unhealthy air and a cocktail of toxic chemicals. Additional research points to the importance of environment over genetics in determining health outcomes. A recent World Health Organization study that found that 80 to 90 percent of our health outcomes are intimately tied to where and how we live, and another analysis by the group found that preventable, non-genetic chronic diseases are expected to account for almost three-quarters of all deaths worldwide by 2020. A 2014 study by Texas A&M University researchers, looking at a wellness community called Mueller in Austin, concluded that the community’s design “led not only to more walking and biking by its residents, but also to greater social interaction and neighborhood cohesiveness [i.e., community feeling].” Combine those results with consumer shifts on diet, exercise, and general wellness, and it makes sense that our homes, often our biggest investments, would receive scrutiny over whether they’re as healthy as they could be.
Originally posted on October 15, 2019 on CURBED. Continue this article here
