It is luxury living for your senior years – but only if you have a tidy nest egg to pay for it.

With an average single suite costing £784 a week, rooms at the Sunrise home in Wergs Road, Tettenhall, are aimed at very wealthy pensioners indeed.

Not that the cost appears to be putting pensioners off.

The £21 million building in Wergs Road, Tettenhall, was the 16th Sunrise home to open in England. Since then a 17th has opened, in the leafy Merseyside suburb of Southport – and there are plans for up to 35 across the UK in the next two or three years.

Eighty per cent of the suites – one-bedroomed with a separate shower/toilet and a kitchenette section, although no cooking facilities – fall into the £784-a-week category. There is a cheaper option, a shared two-bedroomed ‘companion’ suite, at a weekly rate of £658 per person. And there are also a handful of more expensive suites that staff are initially coy to reveal the cost of, believing it will be off-putting to would-be residents.

The most costly suite is, in fact, £1,050 a week – or over £50,000 a year.

For their money, residents get less care home and more luxury hotel.

Home executive director Miles Duncan used to sell Drambuie around the pubs and clubs of his native Edinburgh but now deals in a very different kind of intoxicant, selling the rooms to would-be residents.

The Sunrise Senior Living home, which opened in October, clearly models itself on a hotel. It has a concierge’s desk beside an elegant, sweeping staircase in the entrance hall. Everywhere, especially in the jargon, there are signs of Sunrise’s American roots.

The staff are ‘team members’ and Sunrise is a ‘community’, not a home. The care assistants are known as care managers.

Everyone, from Miles to the maintenance men, including the cleaners and gardeners, goes to Sunrise University when they first arrive and must graduate in 12 modules during their first 90 days’ in the job.

Music teacher Richard Harvey, from Chapel Ash, is playing gentle tunes on a grand piano in the dining area just beyond.

It is dinnertime, and over china dishes of watercress soup, residents are deciding whether to watch the England v Switzerland match on the large flatscreen telly in the lounge or go to the yoga class due to start at 7pm. Peggy Mackenzie, who has chosen a table on her own so that she can continue reading will be watching the football.

“Mr Capello’s arrival gives the game an added interest,” she says. The 83-year-old former ward sister is not a permanent resident but has moved in while she recuperates from a broken arm, suffered on Christmas Day during a visit to the Tettenhall home of her daughter Louise and son-in-law Ralph Findlay, chief executive of Marston’s.

She is trying out the facilities while her daughter is away skiing. “The food is excellent, athough we get rather too much of it, and the staff are very kind, very welcoming,” she says.

All Sunrise sites are identical, built from the same two-storey template, with tried and tested design elements such as the discreet “leaning shelves”, instead of the more institutional hand rails, along corridors and electrical sockets at waist height to save bending.

Outside each suite is an ‘identity box’ displaying the resident’s name alongside personal items that refer to their lives. In one is a creased black and white photo of two teenage girls posing in the sunshine and a 1974 works diary.

There is a hairdressing salon, offering shampoo and sets for £25, and a therapy room where residents can have reflexology, massages and other treatments.

There are spa rooms, where residents can soak in a bath if they prefer, and a spacious activity area where talks and various club events take place. Sunrise offers at least five different activities a day, ranging from knitting to wine-tasting, tai chi to a trip to Tettenhall or Wolverhampton for shopping.

At the moment activities co-ordinator Maria Vincente is sewing costumes for the forthcoming Sunrise production of Alice In Wonderland being put on by both staff and residents. Miles is playing a tree. To make it feel more like home, there is also a laundry room for those who prefer to do their own washing and a large kitchen area so that residents can make a cake or a casserole.

Built into the design is a special living area for dementia sufferers. The rooms are no different but there are added features such as more staff, a secured garden to stop residents from wandering off and a room fitted with fairy lights, a fish tank and lava lamp to relax them when they become agitated.

To look at, Sunrise is about as far from a stereotypical old people’s home as you can find. But Miles says: “Money can buy you anything you want – you can live in a beautiful place but what we offer here is a passion for care.

“It’s about meeting a resident’s needs and going way beyond their expectations. We call it ‘beyond bingo’.”