In Celebration of Intergeneration Month: Senior Living Designer, Lisa Cini, Offers Personal Insights to Inspire Intergenerational Living

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Sept. 13, 2018 /PRNewswire/  Intergeneration Month is a time to connect generations, and Lisa Cini, renowned senior living expert and multigenerational household enthusiast, documents what it took to make a four-generation home work in her book Hive: The Simple Guide to Multigenerational Living - How Our Family Makes it Work.

For Cini, this special month is every month. "I knew we could make this work with a combination of home design modifications and a few simple ground rules to make everyone feel they have rights, personal space and responsibilities in our multigenerational household," says Cini. "What began as an experiment has exceeded all our expectations as a success."

Hive recounts Cini's personal experiences growing up with family members of all ages: "Seeing everyone in the family always pitching in to help each other out, seeing multiple generations together, this was all normal for me, so in the back of my mind I always had a Master Plan." Her home today consists of herself and her husband, their children, her parents, plus an actual beehive, chickens, bunnies and a dog. Her grandmother with Alzheimer's - a fourth generation - who lived in their family hive for four years, recently passed, a loss they all feel deeply.

Cini's mission is to both challenge and assure families considering such a multigenerational arrangement that not only is it do-able, but there is an opportunity for all family members to benefit. In comparing her own household to what she observed watching the bees in the family hive, Cini writes, ". . . the more I watch these bees, the more I'm convinced that we, and they, have an awful lot more in common than our passion for honey."

Lisa Cini is an award-winning senior living designer and the author of BOOM: The Baby Boomers Guide to Leveraging Technology, so that you can Preserve Your Independent Lifestyle & Thrive (soon to be released), The Future is Here: Senior Living Re-imagined, and Hive, which describes her family's multi-generational social experiment (four generations living under the same roof in her own home). Lisa's web site BestLivingTech.com offers technology products that help seniors live independent lives.