US Firm Target Edinburgh For £75m Care Homes

A new £20 million home for the elderly would be built in an eyesore area of Morningside in Edinburgh, according to the plans of an American company. The proposals, submitted to the city council by US firm Sunrise Senior Living, would see a mansion-style care home built on the corner of Whitehouse Loan and Newbattle Terrace, which is currently filled with derelict houses. The company earmarked the site for development in April, but has now changed the plans after consulting concerned local councillors and community leaders who feared the home would not fit in with the surrounding area.

And it has also scaled down the number of units on the site from the original plan of between 80 and 100 en-suite rooms to just 75. It is one of three care homes that Sunrise hopes to build in the Capital, with a total investment of up to £75m that will bring 120 new jobs to the city.

The company, which runs similar care homes in the US, Canada, Germany and the UK, put the plans to the council earlier this week detailing its vision for a new “assisted living community” in the area.

And it claims that, if granted, the new home will provide a “top-of-the-range” care facility for frail pensioners in the city.

Sunrise’s regional development director, Dominic Donnini, said that the new home would “allow frail and elderly people in the city to live with dignity”.

He added: “We’ve only just submitted the planning application, so it’s still very early in the whole process of building a new home in Edinburgh. However, we are convinced that it will provide a top-of-the-range care option for elderly and frail people in Edinburgh.

“As well as catering for elderly people who require a small amount of help to get on with their everyday lives, we provide a specialist unit for those who are suffering from conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer’s. They should be allowed to live in dignity just like everyone else.”
The development will include the mansion, with 75 en-suite rooms, and a sprawling, landscaped garden.

It will also provide 24-hour access to specialist carers for around 20 residents with Alzheimer’s and other forms of age-related memory impairment, using an “assisted living” scheme, devised in the Netherlands.