I Used to Think Care Required Smallness

As I began exploring residential assisted living, I often equated care with smallness. If a home had 16 residents, it could feel personal. If it grew beyond that, I worried it would lose what made it special.

The logic seemed obvious: smaller meant more intimate, more residential, more human.

Part of that shift came after hearing Sarah Dusek, co-founder of Under Canvas, speak about building bigger. Her challenge wasn't simply to dream bigger. It was to ask whether we are building businesses capable of creating impact at scale.

What stayed with me wasn't the size of the business she described. It was the realization that I may have been defining care too narrowly.

Hospitality has challenged that assumption.

Some of the most memorable hospitality experiences I've had weren't in tiny properties. They were in large hotels that somehow managed to make me feel seen. Not because the buildings were small, but because they were intentional.

Through design, staffing, culture, training, and hundreds of operational decisions, they created experiences that felt personal at scale.

What Hospitality Can Teach Senior Living

That realization has changed how I think about senior hospitality.

Hospitality has already shown us that parts of care can scale. The more interesting question, at least for me, is how we intentionally design for it.

How do we create environments where people feel known, welcomed, and cared for as organizations grow? How do we build systems that support human connection rather than replace it?

Those questions are increasingly at the center of what I'm exploring through Jane Hospitality.

We're interested in how hospitality principles—thoughtful design, empowered teams, sensory experience, and intentional culture—might help create senior living environments that feel more personal, not less, as they grow.

The hospitality industry has spent decades refining systems that help guests feel recognized, welcomed, and cared for. The challenge isn't whether care can scale. In many ways, it already does. The challenge is preserving authenticity as those systems grow.

Because if hospitality has taught me anything, it's that care is not simply a function of size.

It's a function of design.

And if that's true, then the future of senior hospitality may not depend on staying small. It may depend on getting much better at scaling what matters.