The Residence at Basking Ridge

Margaret

We visited The Residence at Basking Ridge to look at their independent living community. The room was nice, but there wasn't a complete stove. It was just two burners, and it looked like they were really set up so that they could handle dementia people in almost any room because there were a lot of safety features built in. That didn't appeal to me at this point. The people also did not seem friendly. It was like they were in little groups, and as you walked through, people weren't smiling, so I didn't like the atmosphere. We had lunch there, and it was very good. They had three meals a day. They presented a menu, and you could order anything on the menu. The wait was very long, though. We were there probably an hour and a half before we actually got something. The dining room wasn't full, and we didn't really order something that had to be cooked from scratch, so I'm not sure why it was so long. People did seem to stay a long time there, and they did say that they were trying to promote socialization, because they're not really getting a lot of socialization. Other than that, the food was delicious. We picked a salad, which had some unusual ingredients in it that we wouldn't have put together, and it was just delicious. The facility was kind of sterile-looking. Unlike the other facilities, where they have a doctor and a health center, so if something happens, you're taken care of, The Residence has to send everybody out because they don't have a doctor on site. I think they have a nurse on site, and doctors come, but I just wasn't impressed with their coverage. I think there was a little room where there were two machines, and they had weights, resistance bands, and things like that. The building itself is nice looking, but it's all pavement around it. There's not a lot of nature. It's also in an area where there's a company nearby. It's not bad. It's just not something that appealed to me.