Growing Old in High Style

A new crop of luxury senior housing is turning retirement into a five-star resort stay.

Bill Morin, 82, a retired chief executive, was not happy with his run-of-the-mill nursing home on the Upper West Side. The elevators were always broken, his small room faced a brick building and he needed permission every time he wanted to venture out.

So last year, during the height of the pandemic, he traded up to the Watermark at Brooklyn Heights, a new luxury “senior living community” housed in a former 16-story hotel from the 1920s, with colonnaded towers that evoke an Italian palazzo, an indoor swimming pool and a small army of caregivers to anticipate his needs.

Mr. Morin’s son, Tim, who lives nearby and suggested the Watermark to his father, is amazed by the opulence. “This is never what I would have envisioned assisted living for my aging parent to look like,” said Tim Morin, the president of an executive coaching firm. “It’s the nicest building he’s ever lived in. And he lived in a nice co-op in Murray Hill for 30-something years.”