What is the Inclusive Living Standard.
An international voluntary standard for residential architecture. It does not measure legal compliance. It measures whether the home holds up to real life, over decades, across every stage of human occupancy.
The Inclusive Living Standard (ILS) formalizes an evaluation system that did not yet exist in residential architecture. Codes existed for accessibility. Codes existed for safety. But no standard measured whether a home, considered as a long-term asset and a place of human life, would still work fifteen years after its handover.
ILS is rooted in a residential evaluation methodology developed by Marcelo Roisman, founder and former CEO of Nagish, Israel's first holistic accessibility company (Israel, 2010). Across two decades, the methodology was built through direct field practice in accessibility evaluation, residential adaptation, and post-rehabilitation design, first in Israel and later internationally. ILS is its formalization as a voluntary international standard, issued through Inclusive Living International.
ILS measures that. It is a voluntary international standard, applied to residential and mixed-use projects, that produces a certified score, a level determination, and a technical report. The standard is owned and operated by Inclusive Living International (ILI), which serves as the issuing authority and custodian of the methodology.
The premise
A home is the longest-held asset in most households. It is also one of the few assets whose physical configuration cannot be incrementally upgraded the way a car or a phone can. A staircase decided at the time of plans approval is the staircase the household will live with for forty years.
Yet residential design is overwhelmingly oriented toward the moment of sale. Floor plans, finishes, and configurations are optimized for what attracts a buyer at twenty-eight, not for what works for the same household at fifty-eight, or for the next owner after that.
ILS addresses this gap directly. The standard asks a structured question of every project: in the next two to four decades, what events will this home need to accommodate, and is it prepared to accommodate them without structural intervention.
What ILS is not
ILS is not an accessibility consulting service. It does not replace local building codes. It is not a retrofit program for existing buildings, although it informs that work. It does not certify hospitals, public buildings, or commercial spaces. Those fall under separate frameworks.
ILS is a residential standard for new and renovated residential and mixed-use developments. The certification is voluntary, technical, and based on measured performance against published criteria.
The three foundations
ILS rests on three internationally recognized accessibility and usability codes, harmonized into a residential framework: the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), ISO 21542, and ANSI A117.1. Over these, the standard applies a proprietary residential methodology developed across two decades of field practice.
This structure allows ILS to operate as a voluntary international standard rather than a national regulation, and to certify projects across jurisdictions with consistent criteria.
A home does not age. You do. The Inclusive Living Standard certifies the difference.
Three certification levels
ILS issues three levels of certification, each defined by what the home can support: Silver (universal visitability), Gold (full habitability across life stages), and Platinum (integrated excellence with cognitive, sensory, and technological readiness).
Levels are not aspirational. They are technical thresholds. A project achieves the ILS level that matches its measured performance against the standard.