Rent Guarantee Insurance For Landlords | Eco living: why ‘co-housing’ is the latest property trend
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There has been a huge surge in interest in co-housing in the past two years.
Imagine a small community of homes clustered around a central green with communal allotments in the corner. There is a shared banqueting hall for entertaining and residents pool other resources including the wood-fired heating and laundry. This is not some medieval idyll circa 1350, but here and now in East Grinstead, West Sussex.Rent Guarantee Insurance For Landlords
The small group of nine flats is part of a revolution in the way people in Britain are choosing to live their lives. Pressure on incomes and the rise of the single household particularly, as well as concern for the environment, is fuelling a huge increase in “co-housing†– groups of homes that pool resources to lower overall costs. Shared areas can include outdoor space, an entertainment area, guest accommodation, district heating systems and laundry rooms.
While people who like “alternative†ways of living have been forming co-housing groups since the Sixties, there has been a huge surge in interest from more mainstream families and professionals in the past two years, says Jo Gooding, co-ordinator of the UK Co-housing Network (cohousing.org.uk).
This month the first residents moved into the latest co-housing development, Lilac in Bramley, in west Leeds. The development consists of 20 units, a mixture of flats and houses and a common house, all built from “ModCellâ€, a prefabricated straw bale building system. Another larger group is settling a 41-unit development of zero carbon passivhauses on the banks of the River Lune in Lancaster. The community has a shared orchard, workshops and office space.
“There has been a stable number of about 14 co-housing groups in the UK for a number of years,†says Jo. “But in the past two or three years a further 40 have begun forming.
“People want to join a co-housing community and pool resources, so they do not feel isolated. Often cars are shared and the presence of laundry rooms means people don’t have to add the expense of a new washing machine to their moving costs.â€Rent Guarantee Insurance For Landlords
She adds that living expenses are reduced as new co-housing homes are designed to be better quality than most new homes and usually include district heating schemes with one enormous boiler serving several homes, a more efficient way of heating than several small boilers heating an individual house.
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For designer Serena Evans, 43, moving to Tobias Place in East Grinstead was the perfect solution for a single woman with family scattered around the world.
“When my sisters come and visit with their children I can book the guest accommodation for them. Humans are social animals but with the rise of one-person households, we’re in danger of feeling terribly isolated.
“It’s nice to be able to knock on neighbours’ doors if you need a hand with something. It’s not so very long ago that everyone baked their bread in the communal oven, and it’s nice to recapture that way of living.â€
Tobias Place is a redeveloped former art student hostel designed in 1965 by the Danish architect Erik Asmussen, famous for trying to create buildings that fulfilled residents’ spiritual as well as functional needs. It seems appropriate that this extraordinarily irregular-roofed building is being reused for co-housing.
One of Serena’s neighbours is osteopath Laura Pople, who lives with her children Reilly, five, and Cassidy, two. “Being a single mother you can feel quite isolated, but here you know everyone and it’s comforting to know that if there was an emergency I could ask anyone for help and they would.
“We have a piano in our shared entertainment area and we’ve had several wonderful evenings playing and singing together. The bills are very low as well, which is really important for someone like me.â€
Toby Douch, the sustainable builder behind Tobias Place, says co-housing is a reaction to the individualistic living of the Eighties and Nineties and to the strains most people now feel on their incomes.
“It is a way to survive a period of recession,†he says, “of pooling resources of anything to growing food, providing energy to spreading the cost of having a guest bedroom. It’s a medieval hamlet in a modern context.â€
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