For most homeowners, the notion of growing old in a house is limited to anticipating the happy day when they make the last mortgage payment and burn the note.
But when Denver residents Jim and Karen Harris built their house overlooking the , they actually thought about what it would be like to be elderly in it — with all the physical challenges that old age might bring.
“We really wanted to design a house that could accommodate us as we aged,” Karen said on a recent afternoon. “The thing is, you really can fix existing houses so that you can age in them better.
“But you want to do it sooner rather than later, so you can enjoy it.”
The baby-boom generation is an aging cohort, with even the youngest members having crossed the half-century mark. Some studies predict that half of today’s 60-year-olds will live until their 80s, an age when mental and physical limitations are almost guaranteed to set in to some degree.
The Harrises aren’t kids — they have been married 47 years — but they are still working. And they are in professions that made them suited to design their own house: She is an architect, he a structural engineer.
Their house, a handsome brick structure filled with light from ample living room windows, was designed with a trio of elder-care issues in mind: mobility, agility and balance (such as negotiating bathtubs and stairs), and joint strength, which can be compromised by arthritis.
Clever details abound.
While the house has stairs to the second-floor guest area, the Harrises’ ground floor can accommodate all their needs. The living room and master bedroom and bath are there. Ditto for the kitchen, offices and storage areas. The two-car garage, which harbors the electrical panel and fuse box, is off the kitchen.
The radiant-heated floors are flush with each other, with no steps anywhere, including doorways outside.
Big windows overlooking the golf course open with a simple latch and push out easily.
“You know those windows where you have to push them up or turn a crank?” Karen said. “That’s a problem if your hands become arthritic.”
Ground-floor doorways to the outside can be accessed from all points by ramps, should anyone wind up in a wheelchair.
“When the movers showed up, they just rolled everything in,” Jim said.
Roll-out storage bins were designed to keep stooping or crouching to a minimum. Karen swept her hand from just below her shoulders to right about her knees. “We tried to keep everything in the strike zone,” she said.
This is the couple’s fourth house. Some of the features they incorporated were born of hard experience: Karen’s parents had to move out of their tri-level home after her father suffered a stroke.
“He was a big guy and loved the outdoors, but after the stroke he just quit going outside,” she said.
“If we wound up with limited mobility, we’d never have to leave the main floor,” Jim said.
While the master bath features a spacious, walk-in shower, it also has a bathtub that can be accessed by wheelchair. The bottom of the tub is elevated, so there is no stepping in and out: You sit down, swivel in, raise the tub’s side wall and fill the tub. To exit, drain the tub, lower the wall and swivel out.
Some of the touches were inspired as much by whimsy as pragmatism.
The couple had long tired of setting up and taking down a Christmas tree each December.
Their solution: Assemble and decorate an artificial tree, then put it on a wheeled platform that can be pulled out of a closet by the fireplace as you would a trundle bed. Presto: instant warm-and-fuzzy Yuletide.
For all their experience as designers, building the house was an adventure for the couple.
“It was the experience of a lifetime, but there were a lot of things to be negotiated back and forth,” Jim said. “But we really like what we got.”
So they built a dream house for their old age and stayed married to boot.
“I asked Jim at one point if he wasn’t married to me, would he have used me as an architect,” Karen said with a laugh. “It was one of those ‘Do these pants make my butt look too big?’ questions. He waited too long to answer it.
“But I think we really grew to appreciate each other’s talents.”
Karen said the two were guided by a maxim on how to accommodate old age.
“You try and make the things you enjoy easier to do so you can continue to enjoy them,” she said, “and you try to make the things you don’t enjoy more manageable.”
William Porter: 303-954-1877, wporter@denverpost.com or @williamporterdp
