Ageing in place is based on a simple principle: that people can stay independent for as long as possible, moving into higher levels of care only when there is a genuine need, without their life being disrupted more than necessary. It’s an appealing idea, and one that increasingly underpins aged care reform around the world. But the promise only holds if the system beneath allows people to move fluidly between home, community support, and residential care as their needs change. In Australia, that fluidity is harder to achieve than it needs to be.
Part of the reason is structural. Retirement living in Australia is regulated at a state and territory level, under separate legislative frameworks with their own rules on contracts, fees and disclosure. Residential aged care, by contrast, primarily sits under a single federal system. The result is that a resident’s journey through ageing often means navigating two entirely different regulatory worlds, and, in practice, changing provider, changing site, and starting again. This often occurs right at the point when continuity matters most.
It is at this point that the idea of a “continuum of care” becomes useful. In practice, it means a resident can move from independent living, through assisted living, and into higher-acuity or even hospital-level care, without changing site or provider. The relationships, the routines, the sense of home all stay intact even as the level of support increases. The built environment has an important role to play, but genuine continuity of care depends on the policy and funding structures behind it.
I have experienced what this looks like from a different perspective during several years working as an architect in the Netherlands, including on aged care projects, where the threshold for entering residential care is set deliberately high. Dutch long-term care policy assumes people will remain at home, supported by strong municipal and community services, until they require permanent, round-the-clock supervision. The practical effect on the buildings I worked on was clear: residents typically entered with higher care needs, with many living with dementia. This shaped the brief from the outset, with the buildings designed around a resident population requiring a higher level of support.
Australia also supports ageing at home through government-funded home care, but the Dutch system places a particularly strong emphasis on remaining at home for longer, with municipal and health-insurance-funded services supporting people as their needs increase. This helps explain why entry into residential care tends to occur at a higher level of need.
Since BLP began working with Ignite Architects in 2023, initially collaborating on health projects, the relationship has evolved into a partnership that brings together our respective expertise in aged care. Through that collaboration, we have gained direct insight into Ignite’s work in New Zealand and a different, but equally instructive, aged care model. New Zealand’s nationally consistent approach to retirement village regulation has helped create the conditions for integrated “one-move” campuses, where operators can offer independent living, assisted living and hospital-level care on a single site, allowing residents to transition between levels of care as their needs evolve.
The mechanisms in the Netherlands and New Zealand are different. One achieves continuity through a high bar for residential entry and strong home-based support; the other through regulatory consistency that makes integrated campuses commercially and operationally straightforward to deliver. But the outcome is similar: residents experience greater continuity as their needs change, because the systems behind their care are designed to support that transition. In both cases, the built environment follows the policy, it doesn’t have to work against it.
Australia’s approach to ageing in place is moving in a similar direction, even if the regulatory framework has not yet caught up. Providers who can offer genuine continuity —ahead of regulatory alignment through masterplanning and staged development — create a real point of difference: building confidence for residents and families at the point of decision, supporting longer-term relationships with residents, and allowing people to remain within a trusted community as their needs change. Anticipating this shift, rather than waiting for policy to require it, is where design and planning can facilitate change rather than follow new regulations.
For architects, the opportunity is to learn from these different models and consider what they can teach us about the relationship between care, policy and the built environment. Australia does not need to replicate the Netherlands or New Zealand; each operates within its own regulatory, funding and cultural context. By looking beyond our own market, we can challenge our assumptions about how and where care is delivered, and what a true continuum of care could look like.
Policy reform will be an important part of closing this gap in Australia, but design does not need to wait for it. Through flexible masterplanning and buildings that can adapt as care models and resident needs evolve, we can start creating greater continuity now — allowing people to remain connected to familiar places and communities as their care needs change.
