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Senior class residents
Stacy Tew-Lovasz of Sunrise Senior Living is overseeing the conversion of Clayton on the Park from a hotel and apartment complex into a senior-living residence and has had to deal with more than a few misconceptions about the project along the way.
The property in question is only eight years old and is “not a distressed property,” Tew-Lovasz said. Nevertheless the deal regarding the building on the corner of Bonhomme Avenue and Brentwood Boulevard did come about in an unusual way.
Sunrise Senior Living was in talks with Conrad Properties regarding potential sites in Clayton. When Sunrise representatives arranged to meet at Clayton on the Park to talk with the development company, the high-rise was not one of the properties under consideration. But it soon become clear that converting the building held better prospects than building something new elsewhere in the area, Tew-Lovasz said. The key attraction is the location — it overlooks Shaw Park and is within easy walking distance of Clayton’s restaurants.
The building shut down its hotel operations in May and will reopen with its new identity in September. Those who have apartments in the building have been able to stay in them until their leases expire.
Conrad Properties will maintain ownership of the building, and Sunrise will manage it under a long-term arrangement. The exact length of the contract is confidential, said Wendy Timm, Conrad’s chief financial officer.
Tew-Lovasz said she often has to fight people’s assumptions about what a senior-living residence actually is. To many people, the phrase brings to mind that “icky old nursing home of your grandmother’s,” she said. This senior-living center, by contrast, is all about maintaining a fulfilling lifestyle. It will have a gym, art studio, wine bar and beauty salon.
In some ways the project blends the ideas of hospitality and medicine: A “health-care concierge” will coordinate in-home, health-care appointments; the fitness center offers not only physical workouts but brain workouts, too; and, as in a hotel, staff members are available around the clock, and there is 24-hour medical-alert system, too. The transition from a hotel has allowed Sunrise to poach the best staff from the hotel, Tew-Lovasz said.
All those who move in will be active seniors, and the building will not become an assisted-living facility as time goes on, Tew-Lovasz said. If a resident’s health deteriorates to such an extent that independent living is no longer an option, there is direct referral to and priority placement in other Sunrise centers that specialize in assisted living. There are five others in Missouri, including ones in Chesterfield, Des Peres and Richmond Heights. Another center in Webster Groves is in the early planning stages.
The aim of Clayton on the Park is to allow seniors to “live life on their own terms,” as the promotional literature puts it.
Multi-million-dollar investment
Originally built for $40 million, the refit of Clayton on the Park will cost $10 million. The development is a joint venture between Sunrise and Conrad Properties.
As with most high-rise residential projects, the “apartments get bigger as you go up,” Tew-Lovasz said. The smallest is 450 square feet and the biggest, a three-bedroom apartment, is 18,000 square feet. The floor plans are largely the same as in the building’s previous incarnation, but all the rooms have been redecorated and the bathrooms converted to better suit seniors’ needs, Tew-Lovasz said.
Conrad’s executives felt confident that a sufficient market for such apartments justified converting the whole building, given what they knew about the population of Clayton and other upscale communities nearby, such as Ladue and Town and Country, but Sunrise is the company with the real expertise in this arena, Timm said. It runs 500 senior-living communities around the world. “They knew how to do the models and analyses at a given location,” she said.
When Conrad Chairman Bob Saur bought the land that the property sits on in 1998, he had a vision of “a residential building with condos and senior apartments,” Timm said. The idea of a hotel as a component of the building was introduced later, and the exact mix has always been under review, with the ability to change the mix based on market demand, she said. “We didn’t have a specific exit strategy,” she said.
Some of the facilities the public has come to associate with the building, such as the Finale jazz club and restaurant, have disappeared, but new ones are being created in the renovations, Tew-Lovasz said. Plans include a 50-person theater and a meeting space that can be used by the community. The dining space may be open to the public on certain days; if there’s that kind of demand, that’ll be “a nice problem to deal with,” Tew-Lovasz said.
Clayton on the Park has organized jazz concerts and lectures to be held on the rooftop meeting space, and it aims to be an outward-looking community, she said. “We are inviting the public in.”Type the title here
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