Building Your Retirement Home in Ghana from Abroad: An Accessibility Checklist

Planning a retirement home in Ghana from London, Houston, Frankfurt, or wherever else life has taken you comes with a particular kind of pressure. You’re making decisions about a house you’ll live in for decades, often based on video calls, photos, and trust in people on the ground — and accessibility is the one category of decision that’s hardest to fix retroactively once you’ve moved in and the house is finished.

The good news is that most accessibility planning is simple once you know what to look for. This checklist is built specifically for the diaspora planning situation: decisions you can make now, from wherever you are, that will matter enormously in twenty years.

1. Decide early: single-level living, or lift-ready design

The first real decision is architectural, and it shapes everything else. Broadly, there are two honest paths to a home that will still work for you at 75:

• Single-level living — a bungalow, or a design where every essential room (bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living space) sits on one floor, with upper floors reserved for guests or storage. This avoids the accessibility question by removing stairs from daily life entirely.
• Lift-ready multi-storey design — a full multi-storey house, planned from the start with a dedicated space for a home lift, so that if or when stairs become difficult, the solution is already built into the house rather than retrofitted around it.

Neither is objectively better — it depends on the land you have, the household size, and whether you want ground-floor space reserved for lift-ready planning versus using every square metre for living space now. What matters is choosing deliberately rather than defaulting into a multi-storey house with no accessibility plan at all.

2. If building multi-storey, reserve a lift zone now

If you’re going the multi-storey route, the single most valuable thing you can do at the architectural drawing stage — for a fraction of the cost of retrofitting later — is reserve a lift zone. A self-supporting vacuum lift needs roughly 1.5 metres by 1.5 metres of clear floor space per floor, positioned consistently through the building so the lift can travel from ground floor to the upper levels in a straight vertical run.

The best locations are usually:

• Beside the main staircase, where it reads as part of the house’s design rather than an add-on.
• In a corner of a wide landing or hallway.
• Inside a stairwell void, if your staircase design has one.

Marking this zone on the architectural drawings costs nothing beyond a conversation with your architect, and it means that if you install a lift now or in fifteen years, the house was always ready for it. Full planning dimensions for every model are available on our home lift range page if you want to share specifics with your architect directly.

3. Door widths and turning space

Even before a lift is installed, door widths through the house determine how liveable it will be for a wheelchair or walking frame later. As a general planning habit:

• Aim for wider-than-standard doorways on at least the ground floor and any lift-served upper floor — narrow doors are one of the most common accessibility mistakes discovered only once they’re needed.
• Avoid tight turns immediately outside bedroom and bathroom doors; a wheelchair needs turning space, not just a wide enough doorway.
• Keep thresholds level rather than stepped, particularly between indoor and outdoor living spaces.

These are inexpensive decisions at the drawing stage and expensive ones to fix after tiling and door frames are in.

4. Bathroom access

At least one bathroom — ideally on the same floor as the primary bedroom — should be planned with a level (not stepped) shower entry, grab-rail blocking built into the wall behind the tiles before they’re laid, and enough clear floor space for a wheelchair or walking frame to turn. Retrofitting a bathroom for accessibility after tiling is one of the more disruptive and expensive changes to make later, so it’s worth specifying at the design stage even if it isn’t needed on day one.

5. Power resilience

However accessible your home is, none of it matters much if the household can’t rely on power. This matters for lighting and general living, and specifically for a home lift if you install one — our lifts are engineered around Ghana’s power reality, using gravity descent so the cabin is never stuck mid-floor during an outage, with a backup battery covering lights, fan, alarm, and communication for around 30 minutes. Read the full explanation in our guide to home lifts during dumsor. Whatever else you plan, make sure the house has a sensible inverter, solar, or generator setup specified from the start rather than added as an afterthought.

6. Who hosts the survey when you’re abroad

A common worry for diaspora clients is simply: how does any of this get measured and confirmed if I’m not physically in Ghana? In practice, this is one of the most routine parts of building from overseas:

• A consultation happens first, over WhatsApp or video call, at a time that suits your timezone.
• A team member visits the building site or completed home in Ghana in person and produces a full written report with photos and measurements, so you see exactly what was seen on site without needing to travel.
• A trusted family member, caretaker, or your architect/contractor can host the visit if you’d rather have someone present, though it isn’t required.
• Once a lift is chosen, you receive an all-inclusive, duty-paid quote in US dollars, with staged payments by bank transfer from wherever you’re based.

Full detail on how the whole process works for diaspora clients — including shipping timelines and after-installation support — is on our diaspora page.

Building it right the first time

The cheapest accessibility feature in any home is the one planned into the drawings before construction starts, not the one retrofitted after someone’s mobility has already changed. If you’re planning a retirement home in Ghana from abroad, a short conversation now about lift zones, door widths, and bathroom layout can save a much larger, more disruptive project later.

Book a free home survey — for a site visit, a completed home, or simply a conversation about planning a lift zone into your drawings, wherever in the world you’re calling from.