New Trillium Villa Nursing Home in Sarnia to open in 2026

Construction of a new three-storey building for Trillium Villa Nursing Home in Sarnia is a hot ticket for residents of the long-term care home.

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Some days there can be “two rows of people, like a movie theater” watching through windows in one of the dining rooms, said Shaun Baldwin, a resident and husband of Mary Baldwin, president of the resident council.

“We can’t wait,” Mary said about how eager they are to move to the new building.

Work on the more than $60-million project to replace the Villa began in the spring and is expected to be completed in late spring of 2026, said John Scotland, CEO of S and R Group Ltd., the home’s owner.

“We’re thrilled to see it coming out of the ground,” Scotland said.

Natalia Kusendova-Bashta, Ontario’s minister of long-Term care, and Sarnia-Lambton MPP Bob Bailey dropped by Friday for a symbolic ground-breaking.

The project received help from a provincial construction funding subsidy top-up program as part of Ontario’s commitment to build more than 58,000 new and upgraded long-term care beds by 2028, the minister said.

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“The demand is there,” Kusendova-Bashta said. “We have an aging population. People live longer and have more complex health-care needs, and we need to build for the future for our seniors and most vulnerable.”

Once completed, the new Villa will replace 152 existing beds and add eight new beds. After residents move in, the existing Villa building will be demolished to make room for parking.

“The funding was critical,” Scotland said about the impact of the provincial top-up subsidy to support repaying the financing costs of the project over 25 years.

“Long-term care homes are specially built,” he said. “There’s a lot that goes into the design standards for them, and for that reason. . . they’re expensive.”

Trillium Villa was the first long-term care home built by Steeves and Rozema, the predecessor to S and R Group, and opened in 1970, with 72 beds added in an expansion two years later.

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The Villa preceded Ontario’s first long-term legislation passed in 1973, Scotland said.

Founders, John Rozema and Don Steeves, were “very pragmatic gentlemen but also very forward thinking,” Scotland said.

The company built an addition in the early 1990s that added another dining room, tub room and other space, while also eliminating wards with three or more beds, “long before that was even part of the discussion for long-term care,” Scotland said .

S and R Group now owns seven long-term care homes in Ontario, as well as retirement homes and apartment buildings.

The new Trillium Villa is based on the design of a home the company owns in Kitchener.

“We’re going to go from about 50,000 square feet to 100,000 square feet,” Scotland said.

In the place of the two large existing dining rooms, there will be separate dining rooms in each of the five 32-bed “home areas” in the new building, he said.

Each home area will also have its own activity space, as well as tub and shower rooms. More than 60 per cent of the rooms will be private and there will be “beautiful interior courtyards” to bring more natural light into the building, Scotland said.

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