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Luxury care in Highgate: a Signature approach


Located in one of the wealthiest parts of London, Signature at Highgate may be the most expensive care home ever built in the UK. The Care Home Environment editor Matt Seex visited this brand new luxury home to meet with Wayne Pryce, Signature Senior Lifestyle’s group director of development & construction, to discuss the project in depth


Bishop’s Avenue in North London – better known as ‘Billionaire’s Row’ – runs from Hampstead Heath towards East Finchley and the A1. Famous for its eye-watering house prices (homes on the 66-house street typically sell for tens of millions of pounds) and rows of ostentatious mansions, it is perhaps an unlikely location for a brand new care home.


Walking down Bishop’s Avenue on a cold morning in late January to visit Signature at Highgate – Signature Senior Lifestyle’s latest luxury London care home – passing one mega-mansion after another, each with high security gates and unscalable walls, I couldn’t help but wonder “who lives here?” over and over. In fact, if press reports are to be believed, many – perhaps even a majority – of these enormous properties lie unoccupied – expensive investments invariably registered in offshore tax havens and left empty.


There is still plenty of activity on Bishop’s


Avenue, however, albeit of the construction variety – not least next door to Signature’s latest, where retirement living provider Riverstone is hard at work building its Riverstone Bishops Avenue development of retirement apartments (and penthouses) for a 2025 opening, with a price tag that may even exceed that of Signature of Highgate.


Behind the façade


Perhaps not the most likely place to find a care home, then, even if it is, at the time of writing, possibly the most expensive care home ever to be built in the UK, with a price tag of £50m being mentioned in various quarters (Signature will not be drawn on a specific figure). To be fair, Signature of Highgate does not number among the more vulgar properties lining the Avenue. Rather,


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its frontage is far more in keeping with the surrounding area (or the surrounding area as it once was, anyway). There is a good reason for this, as Wayne later explains, but I first ask him about the reasons behind the location of a care home in such striking (and expensive) surroundings.


“This road and this location are very prominent and very visible and serve this wider community of Highgate and Hampstead really well,” Wayne explains. “We’re looking at the catchment area for the home. We want to make sure that we’ve got enough potential residents to fill the beautiful buildings that we create and invest in … We think that this this area of North London has an undersupply of good quality care beds, and we’re here to meet the needs of the residents who live within a 20


The catchment areas for Signature of Highgate are the leafy residential streets of Highgate and Hampstead


minute drivetime catchment of this home.” The catchment areas for Signature of Highgate, then, are the leafy residential streets of Highgate and Hampstead, with the home’s close proximity to both the North Circular and the A1 extending the catchment a little bit further. As is the case with the other 65 plots that make up Bishop’s Avenue, the site of Signature of Highgate was originally occupied by (in comparative terms, at least) a more modest dwelling. “This was a single residential house,”


Wayne tells me. “It was originally built around the turn of the century. It was locally listed, but had gone through a lot of unsympathetic modifications. The front façade is a replica of the original house and, in fact, we’ve retained some of the brickwork at a lower level and in other elements of the building.”


Signature took this approach in order to get planning permission for a 70,000 square foot building on the 1.7 acre plot. Hence, then, the relatively modest frontage. But as Wayne points out (and my visit confirms), everything behind the façade is unmistakeably contemporary.


www.thecarehomeenvironment.com March 2024


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