Best Small Footprint Design of 2025: Blending Memory Care and Retail at a Compact Site 

A senior living project in Mountain View, California shows how memory care can thrive on a compact urban site.

Villa Toscana Memory Care combines a 60-bed memory care community with street-level retail and dining on just 0.85 acres, creating a three-story, roughly 39,000-square-foot development that links senior housing with a walkable commercial corridor. The project is owned by John and Mike D’Ambrosio, operated by Calson Management, designed by Lenity Architecture, with interiors by Inside-Designs & Eyre Interiors and construction by Swenson Builders.

The project grew from a site long tied to the Mountain View community through a family-owned Italian restaurant. Rather than sever that connection, the development team used it as the foundation for a new model of senior living, one that keeps residents engaged with neighborhood life while delivering purpose-built memory care above.

For these and other reasons, Villa Toscana Memory Care took the top spot in the 2025 Senior Housing News Architecture and Design Awards’ Best Small Footprint category.

The design

The idea for the Villa Toscana project was born out of how to make a small site viable without losing its local identity. In this case, that meant preserving the site’s longstanding role as a community gathering place while introducing a new senior housing use that could serve a growing need in Mountain View.

This mixed-use concept puts memory care on the upper floors and keeps the restaurant and additional retail space at street level, a decision that shaped the project from the beginning. Instead of a sealed-off memory care building, Villa Toscana was designed to maintain an active frontage along El Camino Real including a courtyard that extends the restaurant outdoors.

“People were sad to see the restaurant shut down for a few years. But they were excited to see the new Giorgio’s come back with the menu again,” said Lenity Architecture Principal Aaron Clark.

Early design elements used a more contemporary design, but after collaboration with the city, the design team moved toward a “warmer, more refined” aesthetic tied to the Italian character of the site and the popular Italian restaurant on the property, according to Clark.

“We went very contemporary on the early design. Then in talks with the city, they said, ‘Look, we need something a little bit more heritage-based, based on the Italian theme,’” Clark said.

The Tuscan-inspired palette and composition take center stage in the project’s design, using arched openings, warm colors and more intimate scale to create a residential feel with landscaped and screened-in balconies give residents secure access to outdoor space and a visual connection to the surrounding neighborhood.

The project balances private, semi-private and couple suites with communal dining, activity areas and shared living spaces intended to support both comfort and engagement, Clark said. Villa Toscana is a compact, three-story project, but the upper floors serve as two stacked memory care neighborhoods designed to reduce dead-ends and support freedom of movement for residents.

The floor plan is designed as a “dumbell” with loops at either end of the building connecting spaces to the building’s core. Calson staff developed pathway cues in flooring, according to CEO Jason Reyes. Natural light was also important to the project, flowing through the common areas, core building center and dining spaces with views of the nearby mountains.

“The light in the spaces, the common spaces that we created, stood out. There was this serenity in the view looking out,” Clark said.

Those qualities matter in any senior living setting, but especially in memory care, where light, visibility and legible communal space can influence daily comfort and ease of use, Clark said. Life safety details like fire shutters were concealed within arched doorways to preserve the character of the space while having the required safety protocols in place, an example of how the project solved technical problems without sacrificing design.

Sustainability in design was also an important element of the project, incorporating a fully electric kitchen apart from a traditional pizza oven. The project is powered by 9,000 square feet of bifacial solar panels, helping bring the project into California Green Building Standards Code compliance and LEED equivalency.

Fitting the solar requirement into the roof design was itself a challenge, particularly given the building form and parapet conditions, but one the team worked through collaboratively with the city, Clark said.

The construction

Planning on Villa Toscana began in 2018, and the entitlement process took about two years, according to the project team. Covid-era challenges slowed permitting down but the team was able to work through those difficulties to get shovels in the ground, Reyes said.

The site’s compact nature forced the construction team to account for frontage requirements, rear parking, mixed-use access, memory care operations and outdoor space within a small envelope. The project required “a lot of creativity,” Reyes said. That creativity included a cantilevered building strategy to make the site’s design work in practice, Clark said.

Swenson Builders, Clark said, “really executed the documents to a T.” The project’s biggest challenge in construction came from installing utilities for the project. A late-stage state utility determination forced the team to redesign electrical routing near the cantilevered portion of the building after inspection, Reyes said.

The issue set the project back roughly six months in construction and added approximately $1.5 million in added project costs. Reyes declined to share full project cost details with SHN. Reyes said the project ultimately got through its biggest hurdles because “it really took communication and compromise” across the architect, operator, ownership and contractor.

The completion

Today, Villa Toscana feels less like a memory care building into a commercial corridor and more like a project designed to belong in the area, anchored by the beloved Italian restaurant on the street-level of the building. This has connected the community to the public and serves residents from the same kitchen, Clark said.

“One of the genius components was the mixed-use kitchen serving both the restaurant and the memory care. It’s just such a great synergy,” Clark said.

Reyes said Mountain View residents were “incredibly grateful to get their favorite Italian restaurant back in town,” underscoring how unusual it is for a senior living development to restore rather than erase an established neighborhood use.

The community has a “sense of home,” while offering the technology and support needed in memory care, Reyes said, who also noted that lease up was progressing well as demand for needs-based senior living grew.

The project was completed in April of 2024.

SHN Architecture and Design Judge Chris Frommell said the project was a “great concept” for bringing the restaurant back to life alongside a senior living community.

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