A growing share of the ADUs we build aren't for rental income at all, they're for family: aging parents who want independence without distance, adult children saving toward their own home, or households simply choosing to live near each other by design. Building for this purpose well requires some different thinking than a standard rental unit.
Rising home prices along the Wasatch Front have made multigenerational living a practical choice, not just a cultural preference, for a lot of families. An ADU offers something a shared house often can't: real privacy and independence for both households, while keeping everyone on the same property for caregiving, childcare, or simply staying close.
If aging in place is a real consideration, even years down the road, a handful of design choices are far easier to build in from day one than to retrofit later:
It's worth clarifying a common point of confusion: the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) technically applies to public accommodations and commercial spaces, not private single-family homes. What most homeowners actually want is "universal design," a set of best practices borrowed from accessibility standards that make a home more comfortable and usable for people of all ages and ability levels, without necessarily meeting the full technical requirements of commercial ADA compliance. In practice, this gives you flexibility to prioritize the features that matter most for your specific family rather than checking every box on a commercial accessibility code.
The families who are happiest with their multigenerational ADU years later are usually the ones who designed a little ahead of their immediate needs: a parent who's independent and mobile today but chose a zero-step entry anyway, or a family that built a wider bathroom doorway "just in case" long before it was actually needed. These choices add very little to the cost during initial construction and are dramatically more expensive to add after the fact.
If a multigenerational or aging-in-place ADU is what you're considering, we'll walk through exactly which of these features make sense for your specific family and property during your free site visit, no pressure to over-build or under-build for a future that may or may not arrive as expected.