ReportageFor those who refuse to enter a retirement home but fear isolation, this new type of structure offers independent accommodation, shared spaces and pooled services. An innovation whose success has been reinforced by confinements.
After the cobblestones, the beguinage. At 18, Yves Rapin lived May 68 in Paris. So, at 71, don’t talk to him about nursing home. “Everything, but not that! ” The gray mustache of the ex-neighborhood photographer quivers. For a good year, he has rented with his wife one of the sixteen apartments in a cool building in an eco-district north of Tours (Indre-et-Loire). A very special building like this Tourangelle, where we grow old in a beguinage, grouped together and united. “The community spirit, we regain a taste, with a little less utopias than in 1968 and a lot less substances!” “, admits the retiree, shod for hiking.
Beguinage? The word vaguely evokes tourism in Belgium or history lessons on the Middle Ages. Not really an alternative habitat for the elderly. However, this innovation which allows to escape the retirement home (as long as possible) is gaining ground.
Its principle is simple: inspired by beguinages spread from the 13th century.e century in Flanders and northern France: to protect themselves, single, lay women occupied adjoining buildings around a garden, not far from a church. Version XXIe century: chaste widows and young ladies are replaced by seniors occupying neighboring but independent houses or apartments with shared indoor and outdoor spaces, and a caring companion.
“Missing link”
This is the role of Laurent Loridant, at La Tourangelle. “Guardian-watchman. ” The fiftieth anniversary rider, passed by many trades, is due to both MacGyver (for DIY) and Véronique Jannot (the social worker of the series Coffee break). “Coffees, I drink a lot, luckily, I like that”, smiles the former scout.
Every morning, at the entrance to the building, near the library corner and the panel where the tips are shared, its technical room serves as a HQ around which tenants flutter in search of skilled hands or empathetic ears. Laurent listens, discusses, watches over the opening of the shutters at such and such a lady whose health falters, unblocks the sinks, regulates all appliances, explaining again – heroic patience! – that, yes, to hear the ringtone of the smartphone, it would be better to increase the volume.
Every fortnight, Béatrice Baczkowski arrives in reinforcement. “Accompanist” trained in mediation, she comes to oil the wheels of the small community, to iron out emerging disputes, to support collective initiatives. Everyone here thought of and then signed a charter for living together, but a little out-of-the-way meeting doesn’t hurt. Nothing really violent.
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