AN EXPERIMENT IN CO-LIVING
Two families share Laurentians house
Jessica Dupont was three months pregnant when her partner suggested a radical change to their young family’s living situation: Selling their house in St-Jeansur-Richelieu and buying a large house 100 kilometres away — with another family.
“I was looking for a more stable situation. This project was really moving the ground from under my feet, so I became very emotional about it,” says Dupont, 30. “But I followed the group.”
The group — partner Loïc Bisière, 30, and friends Alexandra Boisclair, 29, and Samuel Desrochers Denault, 30 — had met three years ago while on vacation in Honduras. It rained the whole trip, Bisière recalls, providing ample time to get to know their new friends.
When they returned home to the Montreal area, their friendship deepened. Though they were busy — Dupont is a photographer, Boisclair an interior designer, Bisière the chief technology officer of a Montreal startup and Desrochers-Denault a travelling rep for a sustainability-solutions company — they spent as much time together as their schedules would allow, bonding over their kids and their mutual interests and values.
How the friendship moved from hanging out on weekends, to buying a six-bedroom house in the Laurentians, started with a question many friends ask each other, if only hypothetically: What if we lived together?
Living with, or near, friends is not unusual. Whether done out of necessity or simply a desire for community, friends, intergenerational families and tribe members have lived together in caves, teepees, apartments, communes, longhouses, monasteries and mansions since the dawn of humanity.
More recently, a group of 10 friends together bought a private island in Nova Scotia three years ago, and four couples built a tiny house neighbourhood in Texas and called it Bestie Row. In New York, three best friends bought adjoining apartments in a SoHo apartment building, with secret staircases allowing them direct access to each other’s homes.
Co-living is, in many ways, a backlash against the postwar development of the nuclear family and a tenet of the American dream: A single-family home with two parents and a couple of kids.
“When we look at current society, it’s individuality above all. What we’re trying to recreate here is nothing new — it’s what people did before, it’s collaboration. But people find this impressive, dangerous, risky. That’s because we’ve turned into such an individualized society. It’s sad,” Bisière says.
The topic came up casually at first, over a bottle of wine. What if we could share more of our lives with each other? The couples first discussed buying neighbouring houses and sharing a yard and garden.
Boisclair and Desroches-Denault’s house on Montreal’s north shore, however, was already on the market and they were on an unsuccessful hunt for a new house.
They were having a hard time finding their ideal house on their budget, one big enough for them and their two children.
Boisclair asked Bisière again: What about living together?
“We decided one night, ‘Why not?’” Bisière says.
“We kind of just jumped into the project. As for the reason why, it’s to try a new way of life. Everybody I know at one point in their lives spoke about living together, buying a cottage together to spend the weekends,” Dupont says.
“We wanted to try the experience instead of just saying it over a glass of wine.”
When they began looking for a larger house, they found lots of candidates — houses far too big for the average-sized Quebec family, many of them sitting empty on the market.
They settled on a three-storey, six-bedroom house on one acre of land in Ste-Sophie in the Laurentians, east of St-Jérôme. The price tag, $327,000, was easily affordable between four working adults, but perhaps would have been a little more difficult for a single family to afford. They moved in over Labour Day weekend.
The couples are aware things may not go as planned, which is why they’ve built in a one-year escape clause. They say the project is worth the risk of it not working out.
And besides, they’re already planning for what happens after the year’s up — in this case, building a garage and an extension over the garage to house a co-working space.
It’s been relatively easy to justify living together among themselves and to each other, especially when kids are involved. All four of the children are between the ages of three and five, with a fifth on the way.
Bisière says managing two kids, or five kids, can be the same amount of work. If you’re already making eight sandwiches for lunch, what’s another two or three?
The idea of having four more hands to help manage the kids and the household duties is a relief to these four, who anticipate sharing the tasks equally without assigning specific roles to anyone.
“We know when we are just two parents, two adults in the room, it can happen a lot of times where you just want to say, ‘Ugh, I just need five minutes,’ because (an issue) is too big, too emotional. When we are just two, if the other person is at work or not here, it’s impossible,” Bisière says.
Having more adults on hand to assist or to take over a situation is an appealing prospect.
Besides being good for the parents, the couples believe having a built-in social network will also be good for their kids.
“We really think, to be happy, children need to be together and with different adults other than their parents. We want our kids to be, like, in a village,” Bisière says.
Adds Boisclair, “Our kids are going to grow up differently.”
Justifying their co-living model to other people, however, has been a challenge. Laughter erupts when they are asked how they’ve explained it to the kids, the school and their families.
“We don’t even know what to call ourselves,” Dupont says.
“I don’t think people are really ready to hear that. I had to fill out a questionnaire for (my son’s) school and it asked me who was in the house. I said he has one brother, but also two girls who live in the house — but they’re not sisters,” Boisclair continues.
Their families’ reactions have run the gamut from generally favourable to downright incensed. Bisière likes to offer an analogy in these moments.
“You lived 20 years with your parents, and your parents lived 20 years with you! And nobody chose you, and you didn’t choose your parents,” he says.
“If you can do it with people who you don’t choose, for sure the experience will be incredible with people you do choose.”