Spokane Valley residential designer Curt Schimanski, who has worked with some of the Spokane area's most prominent homebuilders, believes there is untapped demand for new homes designed specifically to meet the needs of residents as they age.

He intends to test that belief through Forever Homes LLC, a company he formed late last year to create and market home designs aimed at people who don't want to have to move due to ambulatory limitations caused by aging or health conditions.

The company's residential floor plans go beyond the limited aging-in-place features some builders now are including in homes to cater to the 55-and-older crowd, Schimanski asserts. His designs, he says, emphasize single-level, "slab-on-grade" layouts with no basements, steps, or stairs; even wider hallways—at 4 feet—than what typically is available to seniors now; and no dead-end hallways or other spaces that would force a wheelchair user to have to back out.

Depending on arrangements with builders, they also can include features such as lower cabinets for easier access and wheelchair-friendly open spaces beneath vanities, he says.

Floor plans Schimanski has developed thus far through Forever Homes LLC range from less than 1,200 square feet of floor space to more than 2,800 square feet, and he says he's focusing on homes that would be priced mostly from $200,000 to $300,000.

"What I'm suggesting is, live within your means and live in a home designed for your future as well as your present needs," he says.

Schimanski says he hopes the designs will appeal to seniors, baby boomers, and even younger buyers who want to plan for the future and remain in one home indefinitely, thus avoiding additional long-term relocation and real estate-related expenditures. He adds, though, that he doesn't know how the market will respond to his concepts, or whether the "forever homes" niche will develop into a substantial part of his overall design work.

Schimanski also owns Advanced Building Designs Inc., a 24-year-old company at 408 N. Mullan, through which he estimates he has designed 900 to 1,000 Inland Northwest homes, many of them in the $500,000-and-up price range.

Schimanski has worked over the years with such homebuilders here as George Paras, Bob Frank, Gordon Finch, and Buster Heitman, and his designs have been used in residences that have won recognition at Spokane Home Builders Association-sponsored home shows.

Although he's developed a number of basic plans through Forever Homes LLC, he says, "The whole idea of this is they don't have to use my designs. They're not stuck with a canned plan," but rather can have him create custom plans that fit their particular needs while incorporating the same level of forever-home elements.

Schimanski says he's marketing forever-homes designs both to prospective homebuyers and to builders.

Two homes currently are under construction that feature designs he's created through Forever Homes LLC. One of them is a nearly 1,900-square-foot custom home that Brent Peterson Construction LLC, of Greenacres, Wash., is building in in a new development west of Dishman-Mica Road in the South Valley for a woman who has multiple sclerosis and her husband. The other is a 1,600-square-foot three-bedroom, two-bath residence that Runyan Homes, of Spokane, is building on a speculative basis at 5521 S. Mohawk in Spokane Valley and that builder John Runyan says he probably will price at around $245,000.

Peterson, who has operated his residential construction company here since 1981, says he's worked with Schimanski often and incorporated a Forever Homes design into the South Valley home after it got an enthusiastic reaction from the homebuyers.

"We've had a lot of comments on that home already," even though it hasn't been completed yet, suggesting that Schimanski's niche focus has good market potential, Peterson says. He says he already is mulling other homebuilding projects in which he might be able to use it, in combination with environmentally friendly construction features.

Peterson says his company specializes in incorporating environmental considerations into every phase of the homebuilding process, and he prides himself on being one of few builders here who regularly builds "five-star"-rated homes, as recognized under the SHBA's Inland Northwest Built Green program. He won a 2010 SHBA award for outstanding achievement in green building and has won a number of other home show awards.

Runyan, who has been building homes here for nearly 30 years, says he also has used Schimanski's designs in the past. He says he already owned the nearly one-acre lot on Mohawk this past spring when Schimanski told him about the forever-homes concept, and Runyan decided to incorporate one of Schimanski's plans into a "spec" home there.

The home that Runyan is constructing features ICF—or insulated concrete form—walls, which Runyan prefers and which basically are Styrofoam panels that have concrete poured in between them and that then stay in place.

"I like the idea that Curt put forth. I especially like it with my style of building. I think they go hand in hand," he says. Citing various benefits of ICF construction, he adds, "It works very well if maintenance and (home expense-related) worries are something you want to eliminate from your life."

For those reasons, he says, he expects the home he's building to appeal to seniors who want to downsize and people getting ready to retire. If it sells quickly, he says he'll look at building other homes using Schimanski's forever-home plans.

With a wife who suffers from fibromyalgia, and a deceased sister-in-law who had multiple sclerosis, Schimanski says he's sensitive to the need for homes that are designed to accommodate certain human conditions. He says he founded Forever Homes LLC after a partnership he was involved in that was working on a "franchisable" development plan for assisted-living facilities featuring a new design encountered financial obstacles that forced it to disband.

Schimanski is a Spokane native who says his interest in residential design dates back to when he was 10 and, just for fun, sketched his family home's floor plan. After graduating from East Valley High School, he earned an associate's degree in architectural drafting with a graphic-arts emphasis from Spokane Community College in 1977, and he started his own business in 1988 after working as an in-house designer for two companies here for several years.

For a lengthy stretch thereafter, consumer demand for larger, more lavish homes kept growing, and Schimanski says his design firm benefited from that trend.

"It was out of control," he says, looking back, but he adds that about five years ago, "That market got kicked right out from under us. It went away."

The lengthy economic slump has returned the market focus to smaller homes, he says. He describes that as a more fiscally realistic trend.