A senior living project near Boston breathed new life into a former college campus, transforming it into a destination for aging and living well.
The Newbury of Brookline – owned by affiliates of Welltower (NYSE: WELL) and Kisco Senior Living – spans 159 units for independent living, assisted living and memory care residents. Its location on the summit of Fisher Hill provides views of downtown Boston, and the community’s design is rooted in New England architecture and heritage.
Welltower initially bought the site in Brookline, Massachusetts, in September, 2019, with the goal of building it into a senior living destination. The finished project achieves that goal and more.
For these and other reasons, The Newbury of Brookline took the top spot in the 2025 Senior Housing News Architecture and Design Awards “Best Independent Living” category.
The design
The Fisher Hill area ranks as one of the largest and best-preserved Frederick Law Olmsted-designed suburban communities in the country, featuring winding roads, integrated natural features and large lot sizes, according to the Brookline Historical Society.
The effort to build a community on the historic 3.78-acre property started in 2019 when the project team brought Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) onto the project. The company’s past history of “working on projects in sensitive locations” made it an ideal choice for the job, according to RAMSA Partner Sargent Gardiner.
The project was designed to match the facades, massing and green space of other sites in Fisher Hill. Designers with Finegold Alexander also collaborated on the project and restored the existing Georgian Revival Mitton House, built in 1896, and gave residents access to a residential piazza designed with ample seating and weather-protected parking.
The community design brings in loose shingle, Queen Anne and asymmetrical colonial revival elements while the historic-looking form conceals a high-tech interior capable of delivering modern senior living for a changing generation of older adults. The community was designed with LEED Gold and Passive House certifications in mind. The site manages stormwater through an underground infiltration system and also reclaims rainwater while using electric heating and cooling systems to reduce emissions.
The project intentionally hosted public input periods to win over their neighbors, who valued historic character.
Residents in the area initially worried about how the final building would look, and the designers assuaged those fears by showing the campus would not resemble a massive, typical high-rise building or block building but rather an “elegant series of pavilions” that were connected.
“We wanted to show that this was broken down and more intimate in their context than what some people were worried about,” Gardiner said. “We took a softer approach offering hand-drawn sketches to help people not feel intimated by the project.”
The town approved the project in June 2020 and the team completed final designs from July to October of 2020.
The new building comprises a series of smaller pavilions that fit into the site’s natural topography and align with the scale of the three-story Mitton House. Designers “intentionally misaligned” aspects of the design to create “spatial complexity” and break up the scale of the building.
The facade of the building references the “rich and diverse” history of the Fisher Hill area as bay windows and dormers add variety to the clapboard facade and gambrel and hipped roofing reduces the building’s perception and size.
In total, the team kept approximately 40% of the site as open space to preserve a historic and natural feel to the property. Together, the buildings provide 208,000 square feet of senior living space with 159 units made up of 81 independent living units, 38 assisted living units and 40 memory care units.
RAMSA designed the project. Finegold Alexander Architects served as executive architect, Pembrooke & Ives provided interior design.
The construction
Builders with HYM Investment Group, Dellbrook and JKS led construction and ran into challenges securing equipment and materials.
The project team grappled with the project’s budget and on schedule in light of construction material delays. Ultimately, the designers chose to substitute certain materials for others to keep the project on budget.
“We needed to make sure that the quality of the substitutions were good enough that we wouldn’t get a call in 15 years,” Gardiner said.
Many visible outcomes in construction, including shadow lines, trim depth and facade rhythm, came from thoughtful and cost-conscious material planning rather than needing “rare or extravagant ones.” The building’s exterior cladding offers a prime example of this quality over extravagance as the project uses fiber cement siding known as Hardie board rather than wood construction.
“Quality didn’t have to be expensive, it just had to be thoughtful,” Gardiner said.
To fit the development into the surrounding Fisher Hill neighborhood, builders emphasized the details, Gardiner added, using corner boards, transitions and joints to give the clapboard and shingle-style the “crispness” needed to give it a timeless aesthetic.
The team standardized windows and used other prefabricated elements to simplify the build, Gardiner said, as bay windows and dormers added variety while standardized windows helped keep procurement and installation moving on schedule.
Mid-build, the team added two rooftop patio and bar spaces for residents and staff to enjoy panoramic views of the Boston skyline. Leading into the community, the team also changed rafters and used “simple” light fixtures that helped reduce exterior lighting costs by 35% of the original cost, Gardiner said.
The “library connector,” a walkway connecting different parts of the building, added a unique element to the construction. The ramp served as a strategic feature that allowed project designers to save nearly $1 million in excavation costs by raising the slab of the southern wing of the building by one foot, Gardiner noted.
Construction was on time and budget in the end, according to Kisco Senior Vice President of Operations Chris Wingerberg.
“It was by far the smoothest opening and the building was in the best overall condition of any of the projects that we have opened,” Wingerberg said.
The completion
Construction crews completed work on The Newbury in September of 2024.
Amenities for the community include a large, centralized dining room and adjacent great room, lounge, salon, pool, fitness center, library and sky bar. On-site nurses help provide care and reduce the need for emergency medical services and the community also offers a shuttle service for residents between events and appointments. A fleet of electric vehicles is also on hand for residents to use.
The building “blends seamlessly” and delivers what residents expect, Wingerberg said.
“The design and the architecture of the community are incredible and it blends seamlessly to the overall Fisher Hill neighborhood,” Wingerberg said.
The restoration and preservation of the Mitton House serves as a “great touch point” for residents and prospective residents visiting the community, offering character and charm that calls back to the site’s original history.
In the months since the community opened, Wingerberg said residents have repeatedly shared that the community has met or exceeded expectations, with the property’s historic preservation and attention to detail differentiating the property from other senior living projects.
The Skyline Bar, a rooftop patio offering panoramic views of Boston, has become one of the most popular elements. The team did not originally include that element in the design, but it grew out of the site’s natural topography, Wingerberg said.
“There’s so much richness and detail and architectural articulation in the landscape that people tour the site and are just blown away and want to move in,” Wingerberg said.
HKS Principal and Senior Designer and SHN Architecture and Design Award Judge Grant Warner said the project was an “incredible achievement” with the myriad site challenges.
“The interior amenity spaces are exquisite and feel surprisingly residential and intimate despite the scale of the overall project. The exterior massing went to tremendous lengths to reduce scale to respect the neighboring single family homes. The piazza is a wonderful solution to simplify circulation while respecting the prominence of the existing Mitton House,” Warner said.
The community is 64% occupied today and is ahead of its pro forma expectations, with the project part of Kisco’s sales and marketing efforts in the New England area, he added.
“We’re all very happy and we delivered a product that is loved by Brookline and the design absolutely sets us apart from the market,” Wingerberg said.
