It was supposed to be a luxury “afterlife facility” where residents could have afternoon tea on the landscaped terrace and play croquet on the manicured lawn. Located in a Grade II-listed former Jesuit seminary in Kensington, Heythrop College was said to include a yoga studio, cinema, hair and beauty salon, dog grooming room, a spa with hydro pool, swimming pool, restaurant and gym. a library. It was one of the UK’s “caviar nurseries” and the flats were expected to sell for more than £3 million each.
Heythrop College’s lavish plans now hang in the balance as it has been revealed that South African developer Zenprop has sold the site to hotel operator Arora at a £30 million discount; This is one of London’s biggest losses in 2023.
The plan, a few minutes’ walk from Kensington Palace, targeted wealthy people over the age of 65. It was designed by US architecture practice KPF (also behind the Scalpel skyscraper at London’s 52 Lime Street) and led by afterlife specialist Auriens. A similar Auriens property on Dovehouse Street in nearby Chelsea has 56 flats, a swimming pool, a wine room, a luxury gym and a restaurant selling £250 jars of caviar, serviced by staff trained in five-star hotels. It’s a far cry from the drab, overheated single rooms we often associate with care homes, and you’ll pay for it too: rent for an entry-level flat in Auriens is £13,000 a month.
Heythrop College looked like a solid investment for Zenprop, which bought the 2.7-acre site for £110 million in 2017. According to Knight Frank, which sold the site, the gross development value was more than £750 million. And a luxury retirement home in London’s wealthiest (and aging) borough makes sense. The 80-plus population in Kensington and Chelsea is expected to grow by 44 per cent over the next 10 years (compared to 28 per cent in London).
In fact, high-end retirement homes targeting wealthy Boomers are popping up all over the UK. You’d be forgiven for thinking The Landsby in Stanmore was a boutique hotel; but you may wonder why all the guests are over 60 years old. The grand lobby opens to a restaurant, cocktail bar, rooftop gym and library curated by Foyles. . A two-bedroom penthouse flat costs £1.55 million. Residents at Fitzjohns in Hampstead benefit from a 24/7 concierge service, landscaped garden and wellness studio. Prices start from £2 million. Knight Frank predicts that the number of residential units for older people across the UK will rise to 820,000 by 2025. With £40bn of equity tied up in residential properties by over-65s in central London, investors now see the senior living sector as a profitable asset. And if older people are offered the right alternatives, housing stock will be freed up for families.
“These integrated retirement communities [IRCs] “It bridges the gap between the family home and the care home,” says Tom Scaife, head of seniors housing at Knight Frank. “I see many 80-year-olds living in one room of their London townhouse because they can’t climb stairs. “We’ll be losing a generation if we don’t offer another option before it’s too late. “We would be disappointed.”
Scaife says Battersea Place, which opened in 2016, was the first high-end senior apartment in London. They sold for £1 million each and the site is now full of a waiting list. “Since then, in a relatively short period of time, numerous IRCs have sprung up all over London and the Home Counties. ARCO, the organization that represents the IRC sector in the UK, says it wants to see an older living community in every borough.”
Nick Sanderson is the founder and CEO of Audley Group, whose first London scheme – Nightingale Place in Clapham – opened in 2020. This place looks more like a private members club than a retirement village. Two-thirds of the flats, priced from £750,000, have now been sold. Sanderson says the typical buyer sells his “4-5-6 bedroom family home” to move there and enjoy on-site hydrotherapy, opera performances, a gym and cinema.
“When I founded Audley in the nineties, the client’s attitude was very different to today’s 77-year-old (the average age for someone to enter a retirement community),” he says. “This generation grew up in the 60s, they traveled the world, they were college educated, they were part of the technology revolution and they live a great lifestyle. “They are fit and active and not willing to accept the misery of aging.”
Sanderson, who was recently part of the government’s Working Group on Housing for Older People, says Heythrop College is a “frustrating site”. Surprisingly, given that he would have been a direct rival to Audley, he says it was a shame he didn’t continue. “Having better quality retirement villages serves us better,” he says. “People still have the idea of a miserable nursing home and doubt that a place like ours can exist. So the more people see it, the more they believe it.”
While luxury retirement homes are on the rise here, the UK still lags behind the US, New Zealand and Australia, where the sector is seen as a thriving part of the hospitality industry. In the UK, 0.6 per cent of people over 65 live in late-life communities, while in the US the figure is six per cent.
What went wrong at Heythrop College? It took Zenoprop 15 months to obtain planning permission due to concerns about the amount of affordable housing on the site, and in August 2023 the developers sought permission from the local authority to delay a commitment to build five affordable homes on the site, citing inflation. had made the project a “financial burden”. They finally had to sell at the end of 2023. This is just the latest development for a site that already has an interesting history. The Victorian building was previously owned by French nuns and was a convent school known as the Maria Assumpta Center for decades. In 1993, the Jesuit training school Heythrop College moved (which had been based at Heythrop Hall in Oxfordshire since 1926) and offered Church qualifications as well as degrees from the University of London’s departments of philosophy, theology and social sciences.
But in 2018, due to recruiting difficulties, rising costs and “changes in government funding,” the Jesuits closed the college. It was the first major institution of higher education to close completely in the United Kingdom since the dissolution of the original University of Northampton in 1265. The university’s library of 150,000 books, considered one of the best collections of theology and philosophy in the country, was moved to the Senate Building. . So what’s next for the vacant Heythrop College? Most likely a luxury hotel. Arora, who now owns the site, specializes in airport hotels such as the Sofitel at Heathrow and Gatwick. So even though plans for an aspirational retirement village are now well-established, perhaps the place could still take off.
KPF and Arora declined to comment; Neither Zenoprop nor Auriens responded to requests for comment