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

[Sandy Thomson (sandy]

Here at Heartwood we use our dining room for big meetings.  It has  
cork floors, wood beams, acoustic ceiling tiles and nice windows.  It  
works great for big meetings.  All we do is move the tables to the  
side or out.  We have a small hearth room that works great for small  
meetings.  You definitely want a nice place to have a small meeting  
as well.  Lots of team meetings happen in the hearth room just after  
or during a common meal.

Sandy

On Dec 17, 2005, at 4:16 AM, cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org wrote:

Subject: Re: [C-L]_ great rooms and ommon house spaces
To: Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.1.20051216141344.02fa2360 [at] mail.riseup.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

Hi,


> 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?

I don't live in cohousing but i work a lot with cohousing groups and  
have
spent time in many a common house.  As a traveling meeting  
facilitator, i'd
like to put in a plug for having one room in your place that is large
enough for nearly all the adults to sit in a big open circle, and all be
able to see each other (without doubling up, and without furniture in  
the
middle).  It seems like many architects don't think much about meetings,
but it's one of the main uses of a great room, a basic community  
function
like meals.

Cheers,

--Tree