La Vida Real Senior Living

La Vida Real is an 11-acre senior’s housing campus combining independent and assisted living apartments totaling 320 units. The facility is also designed to specifically meet the needs of Alzheimer’s patients in a separate but integrated environment. La Vida Real is located in the community of Rancho San Diego in East San Diego County.

IVY served as the Landscape Architect responsible for site design and planning, parking lot design coordination, conceptual grading and drainage, preliminary lighting design and irrigation design.

The primary landscape program elements include a swimming pool and spa facility; lawn sports areas, open-air dining & community courtyards. Other program elements are themed gardens for residents and specially designed sensory response gardens for Alzheimer’s patients.

The landscape concept’s character and framework for the site evolve from the specific needs of the intended population; both independent and assisted-living residents, some of whom are afflicted with Alzheimer syndrome. The Spanish village theme embraced by the architectural configuration generates common landscape areas that occur as a series of small intimate garden spaces. Each of these gardens takes on a unique garden theme & personality. In addition to these areas, there are also more specialized thematic garden spaces such as a ‘secret garden & reader’s retreat’ designed to attract birds and butterflies, an area specifically designated for community vegetable, herb and flower gardening, a California coastal texture garden and an early California mission garden.