The Forever Home Is a Longevity Decision
By Aubrey McCormick | CEO, Rummer Development
"Forever home." I hear it constantly. From the clients I've designed for, on your favorite home-focused entertainment and media, from real estate professionals, and across the building community. It's one of the most beautiful, hopeful phrases in the American housing conversation. People say it with their whole hearts. They mean this is the one, the dream home where we get to build a lifetime of memories.
I love that vision, and I want to help more people actually get to live it. Because there's one question that turns a "forever home" from a hope into a plan: forever through what?
Forever through a knee replacement, a parent moving in, the surprises that none of us schedule but most of us will meet someday. When we call a house our forever home, we're making a promise about the future. The wonderful thing is that a home can absolutely keep that promise, when we design it to. Closing the small gap between the promise and the structure is the opportunity I've built my company around.
The head start most people don't realize they have
It can feel early to think about aging when you're 30 or 40, buying the house with the good light and the yard for the dog. But that's exactly the moment of greatest opportunity, because the earlier you plan, the more choices you get to keep.
And the trends give us a clear picture to plan around. By 2030, every baby boomer in America will be 65 or older, roughly 73 million people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. About 10,000 Americans reach 65 every day; more than 4 million did in 2024 alone. By 2030, one in five Americans will be of retirement age, and by the middle of the next decade, older adults will outnumber children for the first time in our history.
Some call this the "Silver Tsunami." I see it differently. It's the largest, clearest invitation the housing world has ever received to build better. We know these neighbors are coming, and we know what they want. That's not a warning. That's a head start.
People want to stay home, and now we know exactly how to help them
AARP's 2024 Home and Community Preferences Survey found that 75% of adults age 50 and older want to remain in their current home as they age, and 73% want to stay in their community. That's a gift of clarity: people have told us precisely what they want. They want to age in place, in the home they love, on their own terms.
And here's the empowering part: we already know how to deliver it. In that same survey, people named the very features that make independent living easier, grab bars (72%), ramps, chair lifts, and wider doorways
(71%), access to nature, natural light, healthy indoor quality aspects. None of these are mysteries. They're design choices we can make on purpose, early, and beautifully.
Right now, Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies finds that fewer than 4% of U.S. homes offer the three foundational features of an accessible home: single-floor living, a no-step entry, and doorways and hallways wide enough to navigate with a wheelchair or walker. I don't read that as a shortfall. I read it as wide-open opportunity, a chance for builders, designers, and buyers to lead. That same research projects that 17 million older households will include someone with a mobility need by 2035. The demand is clear, the solutions are known, and the field is wide open.
The signals all line up. The National Association of Home Builders finds that 64% of buyers already prefer single-story living, largely so they can age in place. People know what they want. Now we get to build it for them, at scale.
It's not just comfort, it's vitality
Here's where good design becomes genuinely powerful. Falls are the leading cause of injury for adults 65 and older, and about one in four older adult’s experiences one each year. But so much of that is preventable by design. Stairs, step-up entries, tight bathrooms, and poor lighting are exactly the kinds of things a thoughtful home solves before they ever become a problem.
That's the opportunity in a sentence: a well-designed home isn't just nicer to live in, it actively helps keep you healthy, independent, and thriving. That's why I believe the words we use so casually, "age in place," "homebound," "forever home," deserve real definitions and real standards. They shouldn't be marketing language. They should be design promises we know how to keep. That's the work in front of builders, architects, and designers, and it's some of the most meaningful work our industry will ever do.
Why I bet the company on this
At Rummer Development, I've stress-tested this idea from every angle. Through hundreds of consultations, with existing Rummer owners, future buyers, architects, designers, builders, and engineers, I kept arriving at the same encouraging truth, and I built the company around it: Rummer homes are a prescriptive solution for people who want a forever home that supports longevity.
These authentic mid-century modern homes were, in many ways, ahead of their time. Single-level living. Open, navigable floor plans. No-step entries and generous sightlines. Natural light that supports mood and healthy rhythms. Indoor-outdoor flow that keeps people moving and connected. The very features today's research says we need were built into the best mid-century designs from the start. My job is bringing them back to market, beautifully, and built for a lifetime.
And I don't have to make the case in the abstract. I hear it from the people already living it:
“We are homebound and have lived in our Rummer for 42 years. It is helping keep us alive.”
Ralph (94) and Alice (94)
That's not a testimonial about aesthetics. That's two people, at 94, telling me their home is helping them keep living fully. That's what's possible.
The best time is now
None of this is complicated. It's simply the convergence of good data, demographic, medical, and housing research all pointing the same hopeful direction: the most valuable thing you can build into a home is the ability to keep living well in it.
So, my encouragement is simple, and I'd offer it to a 35-year-old as gladly as a 65-year-old: you are early and early is a wonderful place to be. Planning now isn't bracing for something bad. It's giving your future self-more freedom, more comfort, and more choice. The best time to make your forever home truly forever is while you still have every option open, which is right now.
I see it as one of the smartest investments you can make in your own longevity. A forever home should be exactly that, a place that grows more supportive as your life unfolds. The opportunity is right in front of us. Let's build like we mean it.
Aubrey McCormick is the CEO of Rummer Development, where she is bringing authentic mid-century modern homes back to market as a science-backed solution for longevity and aging in place.
SOURCES
• U.S. Census Bureau. By 2030, All Baby Boomers Will Be Age 65 or Older; population projections on older adults outnumbering children.
• AARP. 2024 Home and Community Preferences Survey (aging-in-place preferences and expected home modifications).
• Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. Housing America's Older Adults 2023 (share of homes with foundational accessibility features; projected growth of older households with mobility needs).
• National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). Buyer preference for single-story homes.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Safety Council. Older-adult falls as the leading cause of injury.