“There is still no cure for the common birthday,” former US astronaut and senator John Glenn is said to have once uttered. Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth in 1962 and decades later became the oldest person to fly in space, boarding the space shuttle Discovery in 1998 at 77 years of age.
Peter Otway, 82, and his wife, Doreen, 79, could be called pioneers of domestic space; and while they have not discovered a cure for age, they have invested in an increasingly popular prophylactic. The Otways were among the first people to take up residence at the newly built Grove Place retirement village in Romsey, Hampshire, a facility of roughly 100 units near the south coast of England.
“I think it was the best thing we did. We should have done this years ago,” says Otway. By swapping their four-bedroom family house for a flat in a planned senior community, they joined a fledgling housing movement real estate experts expect will soar over the next decade in the UK and elsewhere, largely thanks to demographics and a looming pension crisis.