Roland Park Place Buys Historic Villa Assumpta Convent Campus for $12.5 Million

Roland Park Place, the only accredited continuing care retirement community in Baltimore City, paid $12.5 million for the nine-acre Villa Assumpta campus in Towson, acquiring the School Sisters of Notre Dame's former regional mother house and launching plans for 120 new senior living apartments.

The nonprofit, which operates its existing campus across from The Rotunda on West 40th Street and carries a waiting list of roughly 160 prospective residents, purchased the property from the School Sisters of Notre Dame's Atlantic-Midwest Province. Construction and renovations at Villa Assumpta are set to begin in fall 2028, with the new campus expected to open in 2030.

The sale closes more than seven decades of religious life at the corner of North Charles Street and Bellona Avenue. The School Sisters of Notre Dame bought the nine-acre property in 1937 to house their novitiate program, and it became the congregation's local mother house in 1954. Thirty-seven sisters moved to Stella Maris in Timonium in September 2025 as the province prepared for the sale.

Sam Guedouar, president and CEO of Roland Park Place, framed the expansion as a direct response to regional demand. "As more older adults seek to remain connected in this area, this new campus will allow us to welcome them with the same commitment to community that has defined RPP for more than 40 years," he said. Three historic structures will be retained. "The chapel, the convent and the mansion will stay," Guedouar added, though plans for those spaces have not yet been finalized.

Lauren Ciotti, director of communications for the SSND Atlantic-Midwest Province, said Villa Assumpta is one of three properties the order has recently sold across the United States and Canada. "It is done out of faithfulness, out of obedience and love," she said of the sisters' move. The congregation's Baltimore legacy runs deep: it founded Notre Dame Preparatory School in Towson, the now-closed Institute of Notre Dame, and the University of Notre Dame of Maryland. The Maria Health Care Center, which once occupied the campus's lower floors, had already closed in 2021, accelerating the order's timeline to vacate.

Roland Park Place, which opened in 1984, is represented in the acquisition by Henry Deford, Tim Harrington and Corey Caputo of MacKenzie Retail. With 160 names on the waitlist and construction still nearly three years away, the pressure to deliver on both the preservation promise and the housing need is already baked in.