Building Options
A new assisted living home in Nicholasville gives seniors another housing alternative

A stroll down Coconut Grove Drive in Nicholasville is much like a stroll through Anytown, U.S.A. Neighbors chatting on the front lawn, a youngster learning to ride a bike. Yet inside the neat gray house with the crisp white trim and cheery red shutters there is a classic case of American ingenuity at work.

After spending nearly 20 years in the healthcare field, Michele Hatton found herself "disappointed in the options" available to the senior citizens she worked with on a daily basis.

"I went into their homes as a home health nurse, so I saw the whole gamut of how these people were living. I would look in their cupboards and there would be no food or there would be blue cheese or blue bread. But they weren't ready for a nursing home," explains Hatton. "They just needed somebody to take care of them. And their family is in Arkansas or wherever."

Hatton decided to take that need and find a way to fulfill it.

Although assisted living apartments for seniors abound in the Central Kentucky area, Hatton envisioned something different. Her desire to develop another alternative for seniors eventually lead her to Bee Hive Homes, Inc., an Idaho company that has more than 40 assisted living facilities spread throughout the West.

Unlike assisted living apartments, Bee Hive Homes are constructed to look like single-family homes and are built to house only 10-12 residents. With such a small number of residents, the home functions like a family unit, with live-in employees cooking the meals (which are planned by a registered dietitian and cooked from scratch), doing laundry, providing transportation for shopping or medical appointments, and being there to assist with medication or personal needs.

The interior is purposefully designed to feel like a home and filled with comfortable sofas, chairs and antique furnishings. Residents each have their own bedroom and half-bath (full bath and shower facilities are just down the hall) and are encouraged to furnish the space with their personal pieces. The floor plan of each Bee Hive home is designed for the purpose of housing seniors: wider hallways and doors to accommodate wheelchairs and walkers, rounded corners throughout the home, walk-in showers, no steps.

After visiting and observing the operation of some 15 different Bee Hive facilities, Hatton was impressed with the standards and consistency she found. Though she had been exploring ideas to develop her own assisted living home, Hatton decided that Bee Hive had everything she had been seeking.

After purchasing the franchise (the first on this end of the country), Hatton spent nearly a year scouting out the right location. Although the facility has the look of a residential structure, building codes for the business demanded commercial zoning. Following an exhaustive (and futile) search of real estate within Lexington, Hatton began exploring outlying communities and found the perfect location in Nicholasville: a commercially-zoned lot directly across the street from a neighborhood of single family homes.

"We wanted to ... keep the residential feeling," explains Hatton. "We didn't want to be next door to a mall or something. I love how you look outside and you see single family homes."

After securing the lot, Hatton enlisted the services of Crawford Builders for the $300,000 project. Construction of the 4,200-square-foot home was completed in February and plans are already underway to begin on another home that will be located on an adjacent lot.

"It will be just like this home," says Hatton, "[but] we're not going to add on. It's going to be another whole building and there'll be no hall going in between to connect it. And there'll be another live-in couple."

Hatton says that with her facility being one of the first of its kind in the state, the state government was forced to rewrite regulations for assisted living in order to include Bee Hive.

"They were regulating nursing homes and medical facilities, but this was such a brand new industry...nobody knew what category to put me in," she points out.

In some ways, Hatton observes, assisted living care is just now coming into its own. "Long-term care insurers are now starting to recognize that we are something they need to look at because we are half the price of a nursing home, in some cases."

The monthly bill for Bee Hive residents is $1,900, a price that includes all food and utilities and 24-hour assistance with personal needs.

"[With] nursing homes, you pay $3,000-4,000 [a month] -- and a lot of times they don't need to be there," Hatton points out. "Being an RN, my background is in home health and hospitals. When you go to discharge someone from the hospital, you're sometimes scratching your head to think of an appropriate place for this person. This is just another option, another alternative."

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