Privacy gradient
The graded path from fully public space to fully private. It lets a resident regulate contact without having to announce that they want to be alone.
Everything on this page is checkable on a visit, and none of it is checkable from a website. Ask for numbers rather than impressions — how many hours, how many meals, how many people at the last meeting — and ask three different members the same question. The variance between their answers is usually more informative than any of the answers.
A privacy gradient is a sequence of spaces running from fully public to fully private, with semi-private steps in between: the path and the common house , then a shared courtyard, then your porch and your bit of garden, then your front door.
It is a design idea rather than a rule, and it does one specific job: it lets somebody regulate how much contact they have without having to announce it.
Why the middle steps matter
Sitting on your own porch is a legible signal. People can see you, greet you, and judge from your posture whether to stop. You have not turned anyone away and you have not committed to an evening of company.
Take that step away — homes opening straight onto a shared kitchen, no defensible outdoor space — and the only available settings are all or nothing. People who want a quiet evening have to go indoors and close the door, which in a small community reads as a statement. So they do it less than they need to, then more than they meant to, and the community acquires a reputation for being intense.
What to look for on a visit
- Is there anywhere outside your home that is recognisably yours?
- Can you get from your door to the car park without crossing the social centre of the site?
- How thick are the walls between homes, and has anybody measured?
- Where is the quietest home, and who lives in it?
The last question tends to produce the most honest answer of the four.
Sources & further reading
- 1 What daily life actually looks like — noise, doors, and the privacy nobody warns you about
- 2 National CoHousing Alliance — site design material for the form the idea comes from
Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written
Related terms
The shared building at the centre of a cohousing project, usually a large kitchen and dining room plus what homes were built small enough to do without.
Private self-contained homes clustered around shared facilities — usually a common house — with residents managing the whole.
The noticing, remembering and smoothing that keeps a community running and never appears on any rota. It distributes itself unevenly.