Cohousing-L Mailing List: great rooms and ommon house spaces

[jim hanson (jimhanson]

We are a forming community on Madison's west side and have a site with an
existing brick farmhouse that we are considering for our common house.
Currently, we have meetings and meals there but there is no single room
large enough to accommodate the whole community when built.   To help our
decision-making we could use more information about how the CH spaces,
especially the great room, are actually used.  Having scoured this list
serve for advice, we'd like to revisit the "woulda, coulda, shoulda" thread
from 2001 (with our added questions on great rooms) and get updated info on
common houses from communities that are living in theirs.  

 

If you had to do your common house over, what, if any, areas stand out as
ones you would like to change?  Ones you would keep exactly the same?
 
What are the least used areas of your common house? 
 
What is the ratio of guest rooms to units?  Does your community have enough
or too many guest rooms?
 

For our great room/dining room, we are grappling with whether we should
retrofit (or build new) for one large (1000sf+) room or utilize 3 existing,
contiguous rooms/alcoves that could be used separately.  Is the size of your
great room a good fit for your community?  How is it used and is that size
dependent?  Do you wish it were smaller or larger? 

 

Thanks in advance!

Liz

Oak Point Cohousing