Living Better With Alzheimer's

What if a village square, a garden and two donkeys could help restore dignity and slow the disease?

- Rebecca Penty and Rick Schine

When Therese Jeffs used to visit her mother’s nursing home, she often found her once-loving and adventurous parent with her face screwed up and her body rigid with tension. Because her mother, in her 80s, had lived with dementia for years, she was no longer able to verbalize her emotions or even her pain.

But when she moved to a new facility built to resemble a small village, her demeanor changed dramatically. At the Care Village, a campus of white clapboard houses on the shores of New Zealand’s Lake Rotorua, her body language visibly relaxed as she spent hours in her shared cottage’s living room, listening to opera or Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. “They played the music she liked, and she would sit there, foot tapping and hands flowing,” Jeffs says. “She wasn’t able to articulate how she felt, except when you looked at her and you saw how she was, you knew she was happier.”

Jeffs’s interest in her mom’s well-being wasn’t only personal. As the village’s chief executive officer, she’s been involved in every detail of the residence, which is designed to care for people suffering from various stages of dementia. The facility is one in a growing number of communities around the world experimenting with models of care that encourage a sense of autonomy and accomplishment. The concept is resonating as societies grapple with aging populations, raising fundamental questions about what care for Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative disorders should look like and whether the traditional nursing home model is outdated.