Perennial Living opens in Singapore with a new model for assisted living
The Parry Avenue development brings together 200 private apartments, medical care, rehabilitation facilities and social activities for seniors under one roof.
Perennial Living is designed to make senior care feel less institutional, with private apartments, medical facilities and wellness spaces under one roof. (Photo: Perennial Living)
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There comes a day – nobody tells you which one – when you struggle to get out of a car, a waiter has to repeat the specials twice, and the lift mirror reflects an older stranger wearing your clothes. Like death and taxes, ageing comes for all of us.
Official figures already put Singapore on the cusp of “super-aged” status, with one in five citizens now 65 or above. By 2030, that figure is projected to rise to around one in four. It is a startling statistic for a nation that still, in the popular imagination, moves at hawker-centre speed.
Pua Seck Guan, executive chairman and CEO of Perennial Holdings, sees the shift less as a crisis than an opportunity. “There is a growing need for a wider range of senior-living and care options that can support different needs and preferences as Singaporeans live longer,” he said. Perennial Holdings, which operates China’s first Alzheimer’s care village in Xi’an, has put S$265 million (US$208.48 million) behind that assessment, betting there is an appetite in Singapore for a very different model of senior living.
To that end, Perennial Living opened its doors in August 2026, and it wants to change your mental picture of what growing old on the Little Red Dot looks like.
That picture, let’s be honest, has not needed much imagination: fluorescent strip lighting, indifferent food trays, the existential dread of institutional care. Perennial Living, spread across 195,000 sq ft at Parry Avenue, works against that image with 38,000 sq ft of sky terraces, curved balconies wrapped in greenery, and a low-slung silhouette held up on tulip-like tapered columns, designed by CPG Architects.
Ten blocks connect via link bridges in colour-coded zones, each floor holding just four apartments with private lift access to most units, and the whole site opens directly onto a sprawling 1.5-hectare park with a dog run and a mobility garden built for outdoor rehabilitation. Interiors were led in-house by Perennial Holdings, drawing on its own eldercare developments in China instead of an outside design firm. Crucially, there’s a warmth to the lighting throughout that owes more to hotel design than to hospital wards. The overall effect, seen from the kerb, at least, looks more like a resort than a nursing home.
Zoom in and the picture becomes even more attractive. The 200 assisted-living apartments range from studios to two-bedroom suites, priced from S$8,000 to S$13,000 a month. Perennial has clearly done its homework on the competition: a comparable studio in a serviced apartment in the east starts from S$11,000, one in Orchard from S$10,500, both slightly larger on paper but offering no amenities on this scale or ambition.
For starters, Perennial Wellness, the centre’s medical arm, is spread over two levels and brings together specialists ranging from geriatricians to oncologists, an imaging centre for X-rays and ultrasounds, and a rehab wing built for gait training after a stroke, or for relearning how to get out of bed without falling. A 25m pool with handrails runs alongside a hydrotherapy pool for water-based recovery work.
Upstairs, the recreational floor hosts everything from yoga and guzheng lessons to mahjong and karaoke.
Traditional Chinese Medicine, meanwhile, is not tucked into a corner here: the centre offers three types of moxibustion, herbal steam baths, and a brewing-and-delivery service that sends prescribed formulations to residents’ doors – via mobile robots, no less – in ready-to-consume pouches, for those who’d sooner not boil their own bark and roots.
Each apartment comes wired for its own kind of vigilance: sensors track sleep patterns and heart rate, a wireless ECG and sleep ring monitor vitals overnight, and a fall-detection system runs in the background. Room service, when it’s wanted, arrives also by mobile robot, which rings through to the apartment phone on arrival.
The memory-care wing has been worked over with a similar degree of care. There is a Music Bus fitted with a jukebox and gramophone, a Travel Shop and a vintage hair salon that are built for engagement and reminiscence therapy. Inside the rooms, a toilet lid painted blue lets residents see at a glance whether it is up or down, and taps are marked hot and cold for those whose memory of which is which has started to slip. Staff refer to the memory-care section as a “gated facility”, an odd, faintly institutional phrase for a space built with this much thought, though perhaps an honest one.
The Olive, the in-house restaurant operated by Wilmar International, serves low-glycaemic, cholesterol-friendly buffet spreads alongside an a la carte menu. A halal-designated section of the kitchen is planned ahead of formal certification. Pua is clear that the development is not designed around any single community. “Perennial Living is designed as an inclusive senior-living community for seniors of different backgrounds, rather than being targeted at any ethnic group,” he said, pointing to a care team drawn from diverse backgrounds.
Whether Perennial Holdings will bring the concept to other parts of Singapore is, for now, left open. “We would certainly explore it if opportunities arose,” Pua said, a line careful enough to mean almost nothing, and confident enough to suggest it probably will.
Whether a mahjong room and a guzheng lesson can undo a generational Nurse Ratched-shaped anxiety around assisted living is a separate question, and one this single launch won’t settle. But the ambition here is legible in every square foot, from the private lifts to the herbal steam room. If the creaky knees and the fading hearing are coming for all of us eventually, perhaps a curved balcony full of greenery, karaoke night, and a hydrotherapy pool with a decent view are not such bad ways to meet them.
Source: CNA/sn
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