Groping our way towards what a place to live might look and feel like
Posted on Jan 23rd by William in A place to live
Last night the idea to find a different sort of place where we could live differently came together. It was great to hear our different voices quietly growing in confidence articulating things we want but perhaps didn’t think of as possible.
There’s a good stage when we encourage each other. Difficult stuff comes later: hard decisions about location; money; the reality of how expensive some very sobering places will be; and all the harsh reality checks that my late friend Richard Craze describes in his book Out of your townie mind.
For now, something brings us together to spend a very different sotr of evening, talking through what we need, want and feel about how we live. Out of near-silence among people who mostly don’t know each other some common principles emerge. We want our own spaces with shared facilities; all generations; rural living with London accessible.
We’d be happy to share: pool; cars (and more specifically car journeys); veg; big dining room and big kitchen; guests and guest facilities; courtyard; music room, art room and/or playroom; big screen; big expensive tools; big toys like a playground; storage space; games; living room or place to lie around/hang out; a library; video/media server; trees/orchard; childcare..but above all a vision. We might share cars, professional help, energy supply, water supply, bandwidth, some bulk supplies eg draught beer.
We need private space to include bedrooms, kitchenettes, bathrooms, breakfast space, study, and some private garden areas.
It might look like the picture above (cheers Chris) …or completely different. We have no idea. It might be a conversion, vacant lot, a church, factory or old people’s home. But I’ll get some agents specs (and others are welcome to too); Becky will help with a spreadsheet; Tom said he’d do something important which I didnt write down. And we meet up again in two months’ time.
We did the easy stuff. The fuller list of what we’ll need to cover might be:
- Financial: the Deal, purchase, ownership, rent, “virtual” mortgages etc
- social: the rules that make it work; how we deal with issues; how many meals to share; how important to meet etc
- balance of skills we’ll need (as in: how many geeks does it take to grow an artichoke)
- legal form (sole trading Genial Landlord, not-for-profit etc)
- travel connections and journey times- other aspects affecting selection of location (tradeoff of cost, landscape, soil, wind and water etc)
- comms
- energy source and backup
- architecture and design
- project plan and management
And it looks as if we might make productive use of a shared pizza oven. No point in just having your own…
Just diving-in with a ‘from the gut’ reaction…
It strikes me that there are probably three key ingredients to realising your scheme.
1) is your Vision, which starts to emerge above
2) the Person (or people) with the shear guts, determination and time to hold the reigns of the project and the co-housing collaborators together
3) the right Mechanisms to hold the group entity (and identity) – manegerially and legally.
All of these ingredients are challenges but I suspect that the most important is No 2 – the person who drives the project through thick and thin.
Have you found ‘The Cohousing Book’ by Kathryn McCamant?
On the architectural side, there are good sources of expertise in the UK but you may also want to seach for precedents in Denmark and Holland, where there has been a strong tradition of innovative housing forms and typologies.
My final initial thought is that you need to expect at the outset for Co-housing not being a low-cost option for a development. The principles of shared living of course can realise low cost and low-impact living, but you will likely need to prepare yourselves for a relativly high capital cost and high risk project – hence my emphasis on needing to find the right Project Guardian at the outset.
Get your skates on as even a smooth project might take 2 years to realise!
XX
William
Enjoying reading the on-going stages
If you want a friendly searcher in the west ( ish ) country and south west, do let me know and I can fix an introduction
Alex