Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: common houses in small communities

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

In the initial design concepts of cohousing from the culture of Denmark, a
large community space was designed to replace some of the needs for personal
household space. In other non cohousing communities with a commonhouse-like
buildings, this is often clearly the case even to the extreme of all the
sites plumbing is in the common building and private spaces are simply for
sleeping. So in theory, a group laundry replaces individual home laundry
plumbing,  a large group kitchen and meal program allows for simple, small
kitchens. In America, often due to both cultural and loan expectations,
individual homes are much more designed to be independent of any group
resources, you can have your own laundry, your kitchen is fully independent,
etc. 

So the  small commonhouse design is somewhat dependant upon what your home
designs will and will not support.  Unless your members have previous
experience living in a community, a forming group have will have some blind
spots about how community actually functions, and really there is no way to
predict the outcome of how you will choose to associate. Hopefully there
will be a huge amount of sharing of resources once you move in. Do you
really need a TV in a commonspace or will people who like football or 24
simply hang out together in someone's home? Will your members adapt to TV as
a group experience?  The same goes for children's activities, will the
parents want the kids to be hanging out in the commonhouse, or will they
want to hang at Steves house to play video games?  The balance of home based
activities vs. community based activities will depend upon your
relationships with each other, your home space sizes and designs, and how
much of the activities you do are comfortable doing together, outside the
home. It also might be impacted by your location, an urban center location
often has lots more things available to happen than a rural end of the road
sort of location. I have been to cohousing groups where because of the
relationship problems of the members, many people did not go into the
commonhouse more than a couple times a year, thus their social interactions
were done in their home. I have been to other places where the commonhouse
is booked up 6 nights a week with activities and meetings.  Neither group
could have predicted those outcomes in advance. 

One of the patterns I have observed is that common house room usage morphs
over time and so even if you build an office in your commonhouse because
when you started you had lots of interest in this,  after you move in and
experience it, it might go unused and later converted into a yoga room
because that is the actual need at that time. Later it might become a
storage place. Five years later, it might even go back to being an office
again.   So based on this my general commonhouse design advice has always
been to think multiple uses of spaces over time rather than dedicated spaces
with lots of built in features that only support a single type of use. Think
generic, how many 12x12 enclosed spaces would be enough. How many 20X50
spaces would be enough? Is there a possibility to add spaces later if we
need them? For example, could a patio later be covered with a roof to make a
covered outside play area? 

Your community will change over time, and thus the needs and usage of the
building you create will too.  


Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood Cohousing
Snohomish County, WA
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