Distinctive Living, the Freehold headquartered senior living company overseeing roughly 2.29 billion dollars in assets nationally, announced the closing of 84.7 million dollars in Series 2026 Bonds to advance CopperWood Senior Living, a luxury adaptive reuse project transforming a historic Somerset County corporate campus into a 214 residence senior living estate. The financing, structured through an entity called Peapack Senior Living Inc. and arranged and underwritten by Ziegler, specifically funds the project’s assisted living and memory support components, with an additional 118 independent living residences planned to round out the full community.

A Postmodern Corporate Campus Gets a Second Life

What makes CopperWood a genuinely distinctive project within the senior living industry is the building stock itself. The campus was originally constructed in 1979 by acclaimed architect J. Robert Hillier, spanning 480,000 square feet across ten interconnected buildings designed in a postmodern style, brick clad facades, copper accented rooflines, a central clocktower, slotted glass windows, and landscaped courtyards throughout. Rather than demolishing that architecture to build something new, the development team is preserving and adapting the existing structures directly into the senior community’s design, arranging the finished residences into what the project describes as intimate, interconnected neighborhoods linked by brick archways and garden paths.

Melillo Equities and PointsFive, the project’s co sponsors, originally purchased the property in 2024 through a discretionary fund and spent time rezoning and formally entitling the site before bringing Distinctive Living on to complete the design and development work. New Jersey based Melillo Equities has built its own reputation specifically around adaptive reuse projects that repurpose historic properties into new residential, commercial, and retail uses, while New York based PointsFive brings additional development capital and expertise to the partnership. Distinctive Living will handle both co development and the eventual day to day management and operation of the finished community.

The Amenities Behind the Luxury Framing

Once complete, CopperWood’s amenity package is built to function considerably closer to a resort campus than a traditional senior facility, including a dedicated performing arts center, a fitness center with a pool, spa, and sauna, an on site sports bar, a bistro, and outdoor tennis and pickleball courts. That amenity list reflects a broader shift already well underway across the senior living industry, where developers increasingly compete on lifestyle offerings and architectural distinction rather than treating a community’s physical building stock as a purely functional consideration.

A Very Different Model Taking Shape in Vineland

While CopperWood leans into architectural preservation and density, Distinctive Living’s other major New Jersey project takes the opposite approach entirely. The company previously closed 45.6 million dollars in financing to break ground on Live Well Cottages, a 130 unit independent living community spread across 25 acres in Vineland. Rather than a single large building or campus, the development uses a standalone cottage layout designed to look and feel like an ordinary residential neighborhood, with built in home care and community amenities woven directly into that lower density, more traditionally residential setting.

The Operating Philosophy Behind Both Projects

Distinctive Living has built its national platform around what the company describes internally as an owner’s mindset, co developing or directly managing properties on behalf of real estate investment groups rather than functioning purely as a third party operator brought in after a project is already built. Across its portfolio, the company applies a signature wellness framework organized around five core daily tracks, learning, connecting, physical activity, spirituality, and charitable giving, alongside a specialized memory care and cognitive support program built specifically for residents navigating dementia and related conditions.

Together, CopperWood and Live Well Cottages give Distinctive Living two genuinely different flagship projects moving forward simultaneously in New Jersey, one built around preserving a piece of the state’s postmodern corporate architecture and reimagining it as a luxury, amenity rich estate, the other built around recreating the feel of an ordinary neighborhood specifically for residents who want their senior living community to look and feel like a place they might have lived in decades earlier. For a company headquartered in Freehold overseeing a multibillion dollar national portfolio, both projects reflect the same underlying bet, that New Jersey’s senior population is looking for considerably more variety in how, and where, they age in place than a single standardized building model can actually offer.