Rest Haven Homes

About the property

Rest Haven Homes sits on six acres in a residential neighborhood of Northeast Grand Rapids, a setting that shapes the way the facility is run: it's designed to feel like part of the surrounding community, not a clinical institution set apart from it. The center's licensed assisted living serves residents across a full range of physical and cognitive needs, from low to high care, including secure memory care for residents living with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias.

That range of care under one roof — from residents who need only light support to those in high-acuity memory care — is what made the 2022 expansion project a hardware challenge as much as a construction one. Different wings of the same building needed meaningfully different levels of door security, without the facility losing its residential feel.

The Challenge

In 2022, Rest Haven undertook an expansion to modernize its highest-acuity unit, the "Love Wing," while growing capacity elsewhere in the building. The project needed to: enlarge, privatize, and modernize the high-care Love Wing, expand low-care assisted living rooms, and add new assisted living apartments to the second floor. That expansion raised the bar on the building's door hardware.

A memory care wing has to balance two competing needs: residents with cognitive impairment require secure, delayed-egress control so they can't wander off unsupervised, while staff need fast, reliable access to the pharmacy, storage, and mechanical rooms, often multiple times a shift, without fumbling with keys. At the same time, the hardware for standard resident apartments and common areas needed to support daily, high-cycle use without feeling institutional.

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Sourcing all five product categories from one manufacturer let the project team standardize on a single key system across the property rather than reconciling hardware from multiple vendors room type by room type, and gave Hyatt's brand-standards review one consistent hardware package to approve.