Principles of Coliving Design and Architecture

“How do you think through the creation, design and architecture of a coliving space?”

That is one of the major questions I’ve been asking myself over the last year. In my newest book, Art of Coliving (published by Co-Liv), I describe 16 different principles of thinking when it comes to understanding design and architecture fundamentals to build qualitative coliving spaces.

These 16 principles are built around four core intentions that a coliving space should honor:

Achieving density and harmony: one of the biggest challenges is to keep the balance between density and harmony. The more dense a space is, the higher the amount of human interactions and hence trigger points. Understanding how to design a dense space while giving residents their own space is the basis for harmonious shared living.
Honoring and enhancing individual needs: in order for coliving to last, residents need to feel empowered in the space. This means that the coliving space should give people a sense of ownership over how it serves residents, as well as offering tools, rooms and spaces that serve their needs.
Optimising for connection: once the basis of density, harmony and individual needs are respected, it’s time to think about how the space connects residents. Creating spaces with the right approach, ratios and technology is crucial to optimise for a space that connects people amongst each other.
Embodying the wider ecosystem: finally, one has to also think about how the space serves people beyond mere residents. Integrating needs of the neighbourhood, of the history of the space but also of the environment is crucial to build a space and concept that will last long term.

In this article, we are going to shine a light on three of these principles that I think are underrated and lack education in the coliving industry.

Coliving is about sharing, at least sharing basic amenities, such as kitchen and living room. But how far can you push sharing in itself?

I recommend you do the following thought experiment. What types of objects and resources could potentially be shared? Then, ask yourself whether you want to offer those options and whether they are feasible.

For example, coliving space The Archive has a shared bookshelf, located on the way to the common area, that allows residents to lend out books to one another. Other spaces such as Oka offer bike sharing. How far can you go?

The following model is what I call the ‘Hierarchy of Sharing’. Starting with basic needs, the higher up you go, the harder and yet more transformative the sharing will be.

Notice that time and income are the last items people share, which leads us back to the challenge of making residents find time for one another.

Highlight #2: Solve human problems by design

“Who the heck left toothpaste all over the sink?”

This is definitely not the sexiest phrase to hear, and yet coliving comes with one guaranteed phenomenon: the tragedy of the commons.

The more people you have sharing utilities and amenities, the harder it is to hold people accountable for treating it like their own. The bad news is the tragedy of the commons is unavoidable. The good news is you can solve it by creating a culture that cares about common belongings and personal actions, one that reinforces its own rules and principles.

But there is one step before that: solving human problems by design.

When I visited Lightning Society, a coliving space in New York City, each floor had one bathroom for eight residents. A total mess, I thought… until I actually saw the bathroom myself: clean and neat, like when you enter a hotel.

“We want to have the hotel experience,” said Timothy, one of the founders, “and so we had to work around the tragedy of the commons ourselves.”

How did they do it? Simply by installing one shelf on the left side of the shower, with a single basket for each resident; it contains their personal toothbrush, shampoo, razors and so on. Whenever a resident uses the sink to brush their teeth, they take the basket, put it on the sink, remove the toothbrush, brush their teeth, put it back into the basket and return everything back to the shelf. Nothing ever lies around. The same applies for the shower. They take their basket, put it in the shower, remove their shampoo, wash their hair, dry themselves and put it all back.

This is one example of fixing a human problem, namely messiness and lack of care, by design.

Another typical tragedy of the commons is in the kitchen: dealing with messy fridges, unwashed plates and dishwashers not being emptied. Let’s analyse each situation one by one.

Keeping the refrigerator clean

There are three ways to keep fridges clean, ranked by preference:

Have a dedicated container for each resident. I cannot stress this part strongly enough, as it’s the major friction point in all coliving spaces. The last thing you want people to deal with is figuring out who left the peppers to rot in the fridge. Having one dedicated shelf or bin per resident solves this issue from the very beginning.
Use tags to mark all food that comes in. Food that does not have tags can be deemed sharable or communal.
In case food seems to perish, you can create ‘getting-old-tags’. Once someone puts a getting-old-tag on an old-looking salad, the owner has two days to remove it. If not, the salad becomes communal or simply gets thrown away.

Keeping common areas free of personal belongings

While personal belongings can be managed where you only have a few residents, they become a messy situation when you have over five.

The one key solution is to offer storage space in the common areas. This practice is barely found in coliving spaces, yet offering dedicated storage areas, if possible combined with tags or labels to separate items, is a huge plus that invariably reduces friction.

Keeping the sink clean

This is a tricky one. A few approaches are the following:

I tend to see a lot of notes with the rule “wash your dishes” left above the sink. But what is even more effective, and less visually disturbing, is putting the note inside the sink. It’s hard not to see a sign that reads “Don’t leave dishes in the sink” when you put your dish on it. Moreover, you could combine it with having the sink be painted with a beautiful canvas of waterproof art, making it the last place residents want to deposit their rotting pasta.
One coliving space realised that by putting a camera above the sink, it reduced the sink issue almost entirely. The best part of it: the camera never worked, as it was a fake cam; the effect was purely psychological.
Other coliving spaces adopt the ‘OCD’ approach. What this means is labelling each plate, fork, and dish with your name or an alias. That way, it is clear who left which plate dirty.

Labeling amenities

Beyond the fridge and the sink, there are other amenities dedicated to residents that need to be differentiated from others, such as spices, food storage space and shelves on the book shelf, not to mention the fridge space and plates/dishes we already covered.

As mentioned in the ‘OCD’ approach, the easiest way is to label them, but this can become tricky when residents move out and you need to retag all amenities again. The easiest way to do it is to have tag names associated with certain residents, such as the following coliving spaces did.

At Startup Embassy in Palo Alto, a coliving brand focussed on startup founders, each resident was associated with a well-known startup, such as ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’, ‘Tinder’, etc. People then knew they had, say, the ‘Twitter’ plates, the ‘Twitter’ fridge shelf, the ‘Twitter’ bunk bed and so on.

At Serendipia Nest in San Francisco, the same principle applies, using the names of famous actors and singers, from Madonna to George Clooney. Each resident was given a celebrity name to identify with.

A less sexy approach is to simply give numbers to residents. Note that while it appears more ‘mature’, it takes the fun and personalisation away. My recommendation would be for residents to choose their own label style, instead of being numbered.

Ultimately, the goal is to automate friction points and think ahead of the game. With this in mind, how can we design shared spaces so humans know what to do beforehand?

As an ending note on this principle, certain coliving spaces choose not to apply the labelling technique, simply because they want to be “less controlling” and “treat residents like adults.” As an operator, you can choose between exercising control on the experience or letting residents figure it out. As a rule of thumb, you can at least offer the option, and let residents decide whether or not to follow it.

Highlight #3: Think in terms of cluster sizes

How many people can you be familiar with?

That is the question the anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar asked himself. Back in the late-twentieth century, Dunbar came up with a model that explains how there is a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

Dunbar differentiates between four types of relationships:

The ‘Family’ (5 connections): those are the people you know inside out, have (almost) daily interactions with, and who will come for you when you’re on your deathbed.
The ‘Extended Family’ (15 connections): those are the people in whom you have full trust, those who know you intimately and who fulfill a deep function in your life.
The ‘Clan’ (50 connections): those are the people you see on a more or less regular basis, about whom you know their fundamental drives and often share a common identity.
And ‘The Extended Network’ (150 connections): those are the people you know by name, are aware of their main interest(s), and about whom you have a general understanding as to how they are connected between one another.

The point is that it is really hard to have a general sense of overview and connection beyond the 150-person threshold. And even for that number, it does not allow you to go into deep connections.

In buildings, the spaces that are designed for a group of people to live together and share fundamental resources, such as kitchen and living room, are referred to as ‘clusters’. For example, a house with eighteen people who share the same kitchen is a cluster of eighteen residents. In a large building with twenty apartments in which residents share apartments with three other residents, the cluster size for each apartment would be four.

The larger the cluster is, the less familiarity one will have, because each resident needs to deal with more people and requires more time to build out those connections.

As someone once told me: “When you come home and a stranger is sitting on the couch, you will interact, because it’s someone important to your roommate. In coliving clusters, people should have the same feeling.”

Moreover, the more people who share a cluster space (such as a living room), the higher the number of relationships that need to be built. For example, there are a total of 45 individual relationships within a cluster of ten people, but there are a total of 105 relationships in a cluster of fifteen people. The number grows exponentially.

After having visited more than 300 cohousing communities, Charles Durrett, author of the book Creating Cohousing, recommends an average of 50 residents per cohousing cluster. Why? Because that amount offers the right balance between diversity and connectivity. Above that number, it is hard for cohousing communities to create a sense of intimacy and collective identity.

What is the right cluster size for coliving spaces?

Coliving needs to have a different approach than cohousing for two reasons.

First, the community is more transient. While cohousing is an approach in which you commit to live someplace most of your life (and usually own your house), coliving is marked by flexibility and easy access to housing. This means you need to create the same amount of connection and identification in a dramatically shorter time. That is only possible if you reduce the overall number of people living together.

Second, coliving buildings, and especially larger developments, can have different types of clusters. Taking the example of a large-scale building with 100 residents on five floors and one kitchen/common area on each floor, the building has a macro-cluster of 100 and five micro-clusters of 20 people who share common areas and have longer interactions.

After analysing the cluster sizes of coliving communities and living myself in different coliving cluster sizes, a rule of thumb is the following:

The best number of residents sharing common spaces in a coliving cluster is between 8 and 18.

There are several reasons why:

Smaller clusters of, for example, five people have four struggles. First, since they are very intimate, it is hard to maintain hard rules such as “don’t leave your personal stuff in the living room.” Second, whenever a resident leaves the community, it has a tremendous impact on the overall dynamics of the group. Third, if two people don’t get along, there is not enough room for human diversity. And fourth, in the case of having several clusters within a large building community, residents of such clusters become very sticky and tend not to interact with the overall community.
Larger clusters of, for example, thirty or forty residents struggle with the feeling of intimacy. As explained above, it is hard to create personal connections with that many members. Moreover, the number of interactions you need to have in order to respect everyone equally is so high, the default reaction might be no interaction at all. Imagine you enter the living room and there are thirty people. Will you say hi to everyone? Or just give a collective hello, potentially not saying hi at all?
Moreover, when having that many residents, amenities turn into a competitive resource, and it’s hard to coordinate needs. And finally, the more people you have, the more you will suffer from the tragedy of the commons. It’s easy to leave your dishes in the sink when there are twenty-nine other people who could be responsible; it’s not easy to leave your dishes in the sink when you personally know the behavior of the eight other people and will have dinner with most of them later on.

With 8 to 18 people per cluster, there is enough diversity to find the right people to connect with, while at the same time enough intimacy to form a collective culture and identity.

When can I not care about this rule?

The only and main exception for not following the 8-18 cluster rule is when larger cluster sizes will help you reach your main intention, such as creating very affordable living spaces. For example, Podshare, a coliving space with several locations in California, has their forty residents sleep in pods in one main area, and all share the same common areas. If Podshare were to create two different clusters in the same space, it would mean requiring more space for common areas and would increase their price point, which is against their core intention.

Case study: Haven Coliving

The mission of Haven, a coliving space in Los Angeles, is to offer affordable housing for health-driven individuals. Their first location hosts 88 residents, split between four houses that are all built next to each other. Haven lets residents sleep in pods and have their room shared with three other tenants; each house has its own kitchen/living room. At the same time, both houses are built wall-to-wall next to one another, and common spaces are open to every member. Moreover, all residents share common areas such as a gym/yoga room, rooftops with hot tubs and dinner tables, a movie room and fire pits.

In the case of Haven, the notion of clusters is split in three parts: the 3-4 residents who share a room build a micro-cluster; the six rooms (around 20 residents) in each house create the mini-cluster; and all houses combined (around 80 residents) build a macro-cluster, as they share main areas such as gym and rooftops.

Keep one thing in mind

I hope these three insights gave you concrete examples of how to apply the principles. Keep one thing in mind: only knowledge and action lead to innovation. Enjoy the thinking process inside-out.