It started on a job site.
Jared grew up in construction — renovating houses and building log homes alongside his dad, then developing assisted-living communities across Georgia and South Carolina. He once converted a 100-bed hospital into a modern assisted-living community. Two decades of watching what buildings do to the people inside them, especially as they age.
Annette was getting the same education from the other side: years as an ICU charge nurse, at the bedside when health finally caught up with people. Different rooms. Same lesson.
Then came the wake-up call. Jared was in India doing humanitarian work — helping at a clinic in a village where many lived with leprosy — when his own health gave out. Back home, doctors told him he had leprosy. That season of life — the health crisis, losing his best friend in a car accident, and the long pilgrimage that followed — rearranged everything. What stuck was simple: how we live should match what we believe.
That conviction first became a wellness program built on the habits of the world's longest-living people — taught in more than 225 communities — and then Santerra, the 320-acre wellness resort we're designing in Arizona. And it sent us deep into an old idea. More than 125 years ago, a famous hospital in Battle Creek ventilated fresh outdoor air directly over patients' beds while they slept. Radical then. Still radical now. We've become convinced the hospital of the future may not be a hospital at all — it may be a home. Fresh air moving through every room. Morning light. Bedrooms that get truly dark. Materials that don't fight your body. Jared wrote about this after a weekend in a hospital room — it reads like a design brief for everything we build.
And underneath it all, the lesson we keep coming back to: health is more than what you eat. It's where you sleep, how dark the room gets, the air you breathe all night. But even more than the rooms — it's the people in them. Invite more healthy people into your life. That belief is why Heartwood isn't just houses. It's neighbors.
These days you'll find us on our small farm north of Atlanta with our daughter — gardens, chickens, turkeys, donkeys, and a couple of opinionated alpacas. The #HappyFarmily at Azure Farm. We built our life to match our beliefs. Luxewell is how we help you build yours.
— Jared & Annette