CO-LIVING FOR THE FUTURE
When was the last time you spoke to your neighbours? Do you even know their names? New developments are now emerging, changing how we live and bonding our communities
In the UK, we have become particularly adept at barricading ourselves within our isolated four walls, behind domestic clichés that prioritise the individual over the communal; a nation of lawn-mowers and curtain-twitchers, Englishmen in their castles. Yet just over the North Sea, things are different. In Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and beyond, there are many more examples of communal domestic structures, housing multiple families and other social units with shared facilities and communal resources alongside more private dwelling spaces. In Denmark, for example, there were an estimated 700 co-housing communities in 2010, and in Berlin alone there exists more than 500 equivalent baugruppen, or building group, projects. Meanwhile, in the UK, there are fewer than 20 co-housing communities.
The reasons for this are complex. A combination of social habits, restrictive planning legislation and a construction industry dominated by a few big housebuilders means there has been little room for experimentation in the realm of the domestic. Yet things may be changing. A handful of developers are responding to the tripartite crises of affordability, quality and variety in UK housing, with new homes prioritising community, flexibility and our changing social make-up.
WIGGLE ROOMS
81-87 Weston Street in Southwark is home to a multiresidence block designed for flexibility. Each of the buildings’ interlocking flats, conceived by AHMM architects, are designed over split levels on either side of a double-height space, with a central void creating a lofty space for flexible living. ‘Our apartments are designed around the home’s three levels of social space: eat, live and work,’ explains Roger Zogolovitch, founder and creative director of developer Solidspace, which works on high-end, high-quality residential buildings on small sitesacrossLondon.Multipleentrancesfromthebuilding’s communal stairway lead into different levels of each apartment, creating independent pockets within the home that might be used as a self-contained office or separate bedroom. ‘We build our homes on the principle of long-life, loose-fit,’ Zogolovitch says. ‘In the life of an apartment, there will be times when you might have a grandparent living with you, a grown-up child, a visitor, sharer or carer’ (solidspace.co.uk).