Common house

The common house is the shared building at the centre of a cohousing Cohousing Private self-contained homes clustered around shared facilities — usually a common house — with residents managing the whole. project. At minimum a kitchen large enough to cook for everyone and a dining room to eat in; usually also a laundry, a workshop, a room for children, and guest rooms.

The guest rooms are the clearest illustration of the logic. Rather than every household keeping a spare bedroom that stands empty most of the year, the community keeps two that anyone can book. The same reasoning applies to the workshop, the laundry, and the large table nobody has room for. Private homes are deliberately built smaller because the common house carries what would otherwise be duplicated thirty times over.

Why it is the test of a project

A common house is easy to draw and expensive to build, so it is the first thing cut when a budget tightens — and a cohousing project without one usually turns out to be a housing development with a residents’ association. The shared meal is the function that most reliably distinguishes them, and it needs a real kitchen rather than a meeting room with a kettle.

An example

The recurring pattern in established communities is meals two or three times a week, cooked on a rota, with attendance optional and a sign-up sheet. That combination — regular enough to be a habit, optional enough not to be an obligation — is what most projects converge on, and it is worth asking about on a visit. A community that has a beautiful common house and no cooking rota has built the room and not the practice.