For many homeowners, the goal isn’t to find a new home as their needs change. It’s to find a way to stay in the home they already love.
That’s where aging-in-place remodeling can make a meaningful difference. By thinking ahead and incorporating features that support comfort, accessibility and independence, a home can continue to work beautifully for the people who live there for years to come.
For one InSite client, that meant finding a thoughtful way to incorporate a residential elevator into their existing home. Adding an elevator can feel overwhelming (and nearly impossible), but with the help of an experienced design-build team, it can be a seamless integration.
Planning for the Future Without Compromising the Home
Adding an elevator to an existing home involves much more than simply finding a place for an elevator shaft. It requires careful consideration of how the elevator will connect to each level, how the surrounding spaces will function and how the addition will integrate with the architecture of the existing home. Ample space also needs to exist below the elevator for all the mechanical parts.
For this project, we designed an addition at the back of the house that allowed us to incorporate the elevator while also creating a functional new space.
On the main level, the addition became a new home office with direct access to the elevator. The new area serves an everyday purpose while providing convenient access between floors.
On the second level, we created a new hallway connecting the elevator directly to the primary bedroom area. This provides an easy, natural path from one level of the home to the next and helps ensure the primary suite remains accessible if navigating the stairs becomes more difficult in the future.
The project extended below grade as well. In the basement, the addition created a new storage room, and we excavated deeper to accommodate the necessary elevator equipment.
Together, these changes allowed us to solve for a future need while adding functional spaces the homeowners can enjoy right now.
Making an Addition Feel Like It Has Always Been There
Function was only part of the equation.
One of our priorities was ensuring the elevator addition didn’t look or feel like an afterthought. The new elevator shaft extends along the exterior of the home, so its design needed to work seamlessly with the existing architecture.
Materials, proportions and exterior details were carefully considered so the finished addition would complement the original house. From the outside, the goal was simple: make the new construction feel like a natural extension of the home rather than an obvious accessibility modification.
Creating a more accessible home doesn’t have to mean sacrificing thoughtful design.
Thinking Beyond Installation
Planning for the future also means considering what happens after construction is complete.
Like other mechanical systems in a home, a residential elevator requires ongoing maintenance. This elevator is serviced annually to help keep it operating properly and reliably.
But we don’t want maintaining it to become another item our homeowners have to worry about. InSite manages the elevator servicing for the homeowners, helping coordinate the annual maintenance and making the process as effortless as possible.
That ongoing support is an important part of our Client for Life philosophy.
Aging in Place Can Start Long Before You Need It
Aging-in-place design isn’t only about responding to an immediate mobility challenge. In many cases, it’s about looking ahead.
If you love your home, your neighborhood and the life you’ve built there, thoughtful renovations can help prepare that home for changing needs—without waiting until those changes become urgent.
An elevator is one solution, but aging-in-place remodeling can take many forms. The right approach depends on the home, the homeowners and how they envision living there in the years ahead.
For this family, incorporating an elevator alongside a new office, second-floor hallway and additional storage allowed us to create a home that works beautifully today while making movement between floors easier in the future.
Because sometimes the best home for the next chapter of your life is the one you’re already in.
Considering how your home could better support you in the years ahead? InSite Remodeling can help you explore thoughtful aging-in-place solutions that allow you to stay in the home you love.
