Building, operating and scaling senior living and eldercare platforms across Asia.
I’m Nathaniel Farouz (高天禮), a French-born business operator with close to two decades of operating experience across Asia. My work focuses on building senior living and eldercare platforms that bring together investment, strategy, operations, care, hospitality and technology.
Today, as CEO of Sindora Living and CEO of Senior Living Asia at Keppel, I bring those disciplines together in operating models designed to scale, remain economically durable and preserve what makes care worth providing: quality, agency, purpose and human connection.
Anthropology sharpens how I read culture, family structures and lived experience within those systems. Photography is another form of attention, and a personal passion.
Explore by topic
Latest publications
The best interventions do not feel like interventions
These uncles and aunties are going to put me out of a job. 😅
If you want to be amazed, watch the video!
At Green Lake in Kunming, I found seniors exercising, dancing, singing, playing music, and walking with their pets, with more energy than most people I know (one of them humiliated me at pushups).
It would not occur to anyone watching them to call any of this “therapy.” But with my professionally biased mind, I cannot help seeing physical exercise, pet therapy, music therapy, and dance therapy.
Maybe that is the takeaway: the best interventions do not feel like interventions.
They feel like a normal morning, a reason to leave home, friends who notice when you do not show up… fun!
Back in our senior living communities, this is precisely the challenge: organizing interactions that do not feel too organized.
You cannot manufacture spontaneity, but you can create the right conditions for it.
That philosophy should guide everything: staff training that enables rather than directs; architecture and layouts that encourage encounters; services that create opportunities, not just activity schedules; and residents who can initiate, contribute, and lead.
A lively community is not one where staff organize everything: it is one where residents start organizing themselves.
If these uncles and aunties represent the future of aging, perhaps our job is to create the conditions for them to put us out of a job. 😄
First published on LinkedIn, July 20, 2026. View the original post.
Learning for its own sake: completing my Harvard degree
🎓 "We refuse to let the current version of our lives be the final version."
That sentence from the Harvard Extension School Commencement speech has stayed with me.
A month ago, I attended my Harvard University graduation ceremony for a Master's in Anthropology & Archaeology, my third master's degree. I started it during the COVID lockdown… "for fun." Somehow, that also ended with a place on the Dean's List for Academic Achievement.
🗿The truth is, I never completely got over wanting to be Indiana Jones. Most people eventually outgrow that dream. Mine simply evolved into ethnographic fieldwork in the foothills of the Himalayas, dozens of academic papers, and considerably fewer ancient temples and cracks of the whip than I'd been promised.
And yes, despite the all-nighters, the flights spent reading and writing, and the privilege of living alongside isolated tribes in the mountains of China, it genuinely was fun!
I've always believed that learning doesn't need to be justified. Not every pursuit has to make you richer, faster, or more successful. In this case, learning for the sake of learning was reason enough. Curiosity is one of the few investments that always changes the person making it.
Ironically, this degree "for fun" ended up making me better at my job too. Anthropology didn't teach me how to operate senior living communities, but it deepened my understanding of the people we serve. Different discipline, same questions: how people adapt when their world changes, what traditions they preserve, which ones they reinvent, and how communities continue to thrive across generations. I never expected those synergies, but I'm grateful they found me.
Perhaps that's the real value of learning. You rarely end up exactly where you expected, but if you stay curious enough, you almost always end up somewhere worth being.
Thank you to Chanelle Ohayon-Crosby, Oriana, Jonas, my friends and colleagues for patiently putting up with countless "just one more paper" and "sorry, I can't, I have a deadline." I know I probably tested your patience at times. I hope I've made you proud!
Thank you to my professors, especially Prof. Joe Henrich and Dr. Richard Martin, who constantly challenged me intellectually.
Here's to refusing to let the current version of ourselves be the final one… and to chasing a few more childhood dreams along the way. 🎩
Credit for the commencement quote: Theo Rowley.
First published on LinkedIn, June 30, 2026. View the original post.
Longevity cannot be built quarter by quarter
🤷🏼♂️Deutsche Bank just put Sindora Living 欣岳年 in the same list as Apple.
One of us is worth $3 trillion, the other manages senior living communities in Asia. I’ll let you guess which is which 😂.
Jokes aside, it’s gratifying to see Deutsche Bank recognize a model we believe strongly in: senior living built around long-term relationships, recurring services, and genuine care rather than one-off real estate transactions.
After all, longevity is, by definition, a long-term business. It cannot just be built quarter by quarter. It requires relationships measured in years.
The article makes it clear: the Silver Economy isn’t coming, it’s already here, and China is poised to become one of its leaders. Nice to see Sindora included in that conversation.
Read Deutsche Bank’s report on the Silver Economy.
First published on LinkedIn, June 19, 2026. View the original post.
At Sindora Nanjing, style has no expiry date
(🎥sound on🎵)Your grandmother might just be cooler than you! 🕶️
🎂Still young. Always elegant. Sindora Nanjing turns 2️⃣!
Two years of care, community, dignity, laughter, and residents proving that style has no expiry date.
That’s senior living on your own terms.
Happy anniversary to our residents, their families, and our dedicated teams!
First published on LinkedIn, May 28, 2026. View the original post.
Four more Ageing Asia recognitions for Sindora Living and its team!
🏆 Better late than never. Three weeks ago, at the 14th Asia Pacific Eldercare Innovation Awards, Sindora Living 欣岳年 walked away with two wins, one finalist spot, and one career-defining recognition for a colleague and friend I deeply respect. Overdue post, but worth writing.
🏆 Innovation of the Year, for our Healthy Longevity Management Programme. Years of R&D with Prof. Brian Kennedy, finally living inside a community: bio-age diagnostics, non-pharmacological interventions, opened beyond residents as a real revenue stream rather than a marketing line. At 90, Madam Ma climbs 68 steps without stopping. That is what "It's never too late" actually looks like.
🏆 Facility of the Year, for our Everjoy Jinan community. An affordable community built with the Jinan municipal government, where we did not cut features or dilute the philosophy to hit the price point. Quality and accessibility are not mutually exclusive, and we are happy to keep proving it.
🥈 Operator of the Year, Finalist. We finished second, behind our long-term partners at Ping An, who happen to be the people we operate our Foshan community for. Second place tastes sweeter when the winner is a friend. Genuinely happy for them. Different DNA, shared ambition, same direction.
🏅 And then there is Thierry Costanzo 顾特睿 our COO, who received the Global Ageing Influencer Award for a career spent bridging European and Asian senior living, and quietly pioneering modern eldercare in China. Thierry has been in this fight longer than most of us, and with less noise. About time!
💛 Thank you to Ageing Asia and the jury, to our teams in Nanjing, Jinan, and Foshan, to our partners, and to the residents and families who keep us loyal to our motto: Live on your own terms.
First published on LinkedIn, May 8, 2026. View the original post.
AI will automate tasks, not presence
🤖 AI just declared senior living safe from disruption. My reaction wasn't relief.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, just published a landmark study mapping which jobs AI will automate next.
Computer programmers: 75% of tasks covered. Customer service reps: 70%. Data entry: 67%.
Caregivers, nurses aides, care home staff: 0%.
I've spent 13 years building senior care platforms across Asia. And when I saw that number, my first thought wasn't "great, we're protected." It was: if our people are irreplaceable, why is it still so hard to convince talented people that care is a career worth choosing? Because here's what low AI exposure actually means in our sector. It doesn't mean low pressure. And it doesn't automatically translate into recognition, status, or career desirability. Society has a long habit of undervaluing the work it cannot replace. That's the real problem we need to solve.
Now flip it the other way.
The back office of senior care, documentation, scheduling, compliance, staffing logistics, is highly exposed to AI. That's exactly where we should be deploying it. Not to cut headcount. To return time to the people whose work no algorithm will ever replicate.
And there's one more thing the study hints at, that nobody in our sector is talking about. Millions of educated, higher-paid white-collar workers may face real disruption in the next few years. Some will need to reinvent entirely. Care is one of the few fields that will remain structurally, irreducibly human.
That's not a consolation prize. That could be the most meaningful redeployment story of the next decade, if we make care a profession people actually want to enter.
AI will automate the task. It will never automate the presence.
So here's my question: is caregiving undervalued because it's hard to automate, or is it hard to automate because it's been undervalued? Anthropic’s full study is worth reading even if senior living is the last thing on your mind — especially then.
First published on LinkedIn, March 9, 2026. View the original post.