We went to Covenant Living at the Samarkand. The grounds were absolutely delightful. You felt like you were living in a park. Things opened up to beautiful landscaping, and the pool was lovely. It had a sense of being quite lively. There was a lot of activity going on outside, and it seemed very friendly and very warm. The staff person who showed us around was a delight. We love the history of the place. It had actually been a hotel at one point, and it had sort of the architectural bones of the old Spanish style hotel. It was easy to get to from the freeway. It's very close to a main street in Santa Barbara, which was nice. We liked it very much except for two things. One is that the units we saw just seemed quite cramped. I realize that in Santa Barbara you do a lot of outdoor living, but the living room/dining area in the unit felt sort of like my grandmother's assisted living. It didn't feel like independent living. It was kind of a downer for me. I'm waiting to see if they had some bigger apartments. As you're wandering around, you don't have the feeling that a religious based organization owns the place. However, all of their vehicles have giant lettering that say Covenant (which on the West Coast sounds very conservative theological), and it's not sort of our direction. It felt a little strange to us. They had a big place for services. One side was sort of the synagogue side; the other side was kind of the nondenominational Christian side. Everything was very definitely resident driven. The staff mentioned, "We're getting a lot of people who want to sew. We're going to have to make some space for the quilters." I love that; that's exactly what you want to hear. The rooms were just too small. They felt cramped, and their kitchens were quite small. Their accommodations were not that good, but the grounds were stunning. I love the park and the way it was designed. I loved the landscape architecture of the place, including the actual architecture of the building and their layout for the residents. If you were single, it might be very different. It was cramped for a couple.

I really like The Samarkand. They are great and had everything you can think of, including a fitness center and café in addition to the dining room. The units and apartments are beautiful had a patio and balcony. The grounds themselves are just gorgeous. There’s lot of activities and interests groups.

My experience was very positive. The nice thing about Covenant Retirement Communities is they allow people to stay there for two nights and arrange for visitors to have meals with the residents in their dining rooms. You're allowed to explore the local community, and they had religious activities like bible studies and prayer meetings. The staff was very pleasant and very enjoyable to meet and talk with. The Samarkand was a former hotel, and the rooms were not standard. They were different in shape. They were very nice and varied in size. There were multiple buildings there. The dining room was very nice, and they had three meals a day. They had outings where they take the residents on the bus, and they had various activities on the campus itself. I liked the religious aspect of it. They were very focused on the Christian faith, but they did not discriminate based on faith.

This facility is the place that m family and I chose as a placement for my mother. She was diagnosed with dementia, and could not live at home any longer. After visiting a number of similar facilities in the area, we chose to place my mom there because they had a comfortable feeling facility, accommodating staff, and had a living space available quickly. Now that she has been there for a while, we are all still happy with the space, but haven't always been as confident with their day to day care staff. There were a number of problems in setting up her prescriptions being dispensed, for instance. But on the whole, we are confident in the living situation, and most importantly, my mom is happy there.