Shared living (build-to-rent, community housing, coliving, participatory habitat, etc.) is one of the most pivotal and exciting fields emerging in design today. Over the last few years, as this industry has matured, competition crowded in, and more nuanced challenges came into focus, certain design strategies and principles have proven invaluable.

So, what have the last three years of pilot spaces, new typologies, and different models taught us about coliving design? How should we understand design's role in coliving today? And what are some of the key challenges and opportunities developers and operators can unlock with smart designs looking ahead?

Last week, the global Co-Liv Summit invited Laura Sundin (Design and Build Group Manager at DoveVivo), Tom Manwell (Director at Wellstudio Architecture), and Cutwork’s co-founder, Kelsea Crawford, to come together and unpack everything we've learned designing coliving projects around the world – and how design can expand the industry's potential moving forward.

There is plenty to be explored and learned about shared living design, but as the market floods and developers and operators race to propagate new, competitive projects, I thought this would be a key moment to share new insights and design strategies that the movement can build upon.

Here are x7 key points that emerged from our discussion.

1— People do not want to live in brands. 🚫

One of the key challenges architects and designers are addressing is how to brand shared residential spaces. This industry has taken a lot of notes from hotels and coworking, but the challenge is actually quite fine: people do not want to live in brands.

The general trend is straightforward: the more branded the space, the less possibilities and opportunities people have to appropriate the space for themselves. The less residents can appropriate their space, the less empowered they are to take ownership and make the space feel like home. Generally, the heavier/louder the brand, the less belonging people feel – and ultimately, the shorter they stay.

If the goal is to make people feel more comfortable, connected, and at home – helping to extend their stays – the challenge rests in a fine balance. Key questions to orient a design around include: how can we design residential products that are branded enough to create harmony across a portfolio of spaces – and be immediately recognizable – without making the space feel suffocating or overwhelming? And how can we scale a product that feels like someone's own space for 150 different people in a large-scale coliving project?

This is one of the biggest challenges we are working with today.

2— The rules of appropriation. 💡

When you walk into a room, do you see possibilities? Or do you see one or two solutions that the architect has laid out to you beforehand? For example, in the Volkshotel in Amsterdam, when you walk in, you'll find about eight different places to sit. This is a very different feeling than entering a classic hotel room where there is one chair, one desk, one bed, and a highly predefined way of using the space.

On one hand, people don't have to think about anything. All solutions are predetermined and ready for their predefined use. While this might be convenient, it is the definition of an inflexible, limited space. Alternatively, when we are presented with options and can freely discover or choose on our own, we will feel greater ownership of that experience. Our choices and solutions become our own. And without such opportunities to create ownership of the space and the way it is used, how much can we expect people to consider the space to be a long-term solution – let alone to feel at home?

In a nutshell: appropriation empowers residents to feel belonging and at home in the space.

As designers, we need to leave enough blank space – room for interpretation – for residents to appropriate and use space in ways we cannot foresee. But there is even greater opportunity for operators and developers to co-create their space with their residents.

Maxime Armand, cofounder of Urban Campus, shared a keen community facilitation strategy. In a pilot project, they saved a dedicated empty space and budget for the project to reach occupancy. They then facilitated feedback and discussion across the whole community to understand how residents envisioned what this space could become.

Urban Campus of course had lots of ideas about what this space could turn into, but they gave this power over to their community to maximize its impact and fit to their specific needs. The charts above show the immediate impact this process of co-creation had on how residents used that space. Each illustrates the amount of time residents used that communal space before and after it was appropriated into a fully operational gym.

Not only did residents spend around 30% more time in this space, it gave them new opportunities to work out together, build relationships, and bond over their shared interests in fitness, health, and common routines.

3— Streamlining community curation by design. 🧲

Community has emerged as one of the most crucial ingredients to determine the success of a coliving brand. Thriving communities not only mean more meaningful experiences and greater wellbeing for residents, but they result in longer rental commitments, more stable revenue, and ultimately, more competitive, profitable coliving models.

There is incredible focus on how to crack the magic formula: how to build and scale thriving communities. This is no simple feat. And no matter how impressive and amazing the design is, if you don't get the right people, you will not retain residents. Design is great, but people are everything.

It all comes down to attracting and curating for highly-compatible people, and thus design needs to reorient itself around this fact. This is where design plays its first big role: helping attract and filter in the right people – people who are willing to engage and participate in building the community.

When operators take broad, generic approaches to their brand, values, and spatial design, they discover that it's very difficult to build a stable community. Such a wide segment of residents can all have very different desires and needs and might not share so much in common. If they don't happen to connect with enough of the other members of the space, they don't stay long. This means greater turn-over and less stable revenue for operators.

Designers have to work with what they know, but the more clearly operators / developers can define and truly understand their audience in the creative brief, the more the design can work to reflect the distinct values and desires of the specific community. Studying and understanding different segments of users is one of the biggest opportunities for design to evolve, for operators to streamline their community curation process, and to get one step closer to cracking the community recipe.

(For the curious, we wrote up a landmark guide on how to build magnetic, resilient communities. You can read here.)

4— Flexibility, the new prerequisite to investment. 🌟

We all know flexibility is vital for residents to change and appropriate their space to their changing needs. But flexibility is equally critical for design concepts to be able to adapt to any and every kind of space.

The core elements of a design should be considered and thought to not only embody and reflect the brand's values but to be able to translate the brand into any kind of environment and conditions: new-build, existing office building, small-scale, large-scale, renovation, etc.

It's about standardized flexibility — or flexibility in a standardized way.

— Laura Sundin
DoveVivo

As Laura points, this kind of 'standardized flexibility' in the design concept is becoming a crucial prerequisite for more and more investors looking to back projects. Designers need to be conscious of this shift and ensure their designs are fully adaptable to support and empower their clients' ability to scale.

5— Reframing quality of space. ☀️ 🌱 👀

Often people talk about is how big a space is in meters squared. This has become a go-to metric to understand the quality of life in a space, yet it is increasingly irrelevant to the standards of space today, especially in terms of designing spaces for well-being.

There are increasing examples of compact, 25m2 spaces with lots of natural light, materials, plants, and good acoustics that feel more generous than larger 40m2 spaces that are poorly designed and have limited natural light.

What if we had a measurement to qualify the amount of natural light in a room? How much would this change the way we understood the quality of spaces?

Designing spaces for well-being is not rocket science. It really comes down to some very simple things.

— Tom Manwell
DoveVivo

When we can build projects with high ceilings, tall windows, and wood, of course, it's dreamy. But while architects and designers must work with what they have, and within boundaries of a site, there are tricks we can use to make spaces feel more generous than it is. For example, light wells can help to "pipe-in" natural light deeper into a space. In new build projects, architects can orient the building to maximize natural light, views of nature and horizon lines.

Acoustics are a largely underappreciated yet critical means to help transition between private and communal spaces. The ability to be and feel alone in your private room is limited by whatever noise can come through the walls.

A final general rule of thumb: plants make people happy. Bringing lush, green walls, and potters into the space, in ways that are easy to tend to and maintain, is a safe and ever-attractive bet. Of course, this goes for natural materials as well.

6— Reimagining the shared kitchen. 🔥 💧 ❄️

After years of projects, it's become crystal clear that the kitchen needs to be completely reimagined for coliving.

Most projects still retrofit traditional kitchens into this completely new way of living. This unintentionally creates bottlenecks and scarcity for residents to access fire, water, and ice (stoves, faucets, and fridge space). The kitchen remains one of the key sticking points of friction to be addressed in the coliving user experience.

So, how could a kitchen look that is actually designed for shared living? After all, the kitchen and eating space is where most communities are born, live, and thrive. There is natural gravity and possibility in this space, so it deserves some real consideration. And as new kinds of coliving kitchens are cracked, we'll see some impressive shifts in how community can take place and grow inside of coliving.

For the last year and a half, we have been incredibly grateful to join Vienne's industrial design school Die Angewandte as guest professors with German designer Stefan Diez. Guiding thirty young industrial design students, we are exploring whole new formulations of this space to unkink activities and extend the space's potential to nurture communities. (This includes some awesome new kitchen designs we're developing with Diez Office and hope to share soon! You can stay tuned here.)

7— New horizons for shared living design. 🔭

As a testament to the rise of shared living products, "in the last three years, Google searches for the term 'coliving' have increased over 500%," Tom Manwell points. Demand is only growing and developers are rushing to secure new segments of the market.

So how will design come to define this next era of shared living? And what are some of the most promising opportunities for developers, operators, and designers to explore together?

We've compiled a summary of bullet points to keep your eyes on looking ahead:

• The rise of rural, retreat, and pop-up coliving spaces and experiences.

• Niching of shared living into new types of space and typologies – responding to societal change and new markets (ie, families, local demographics, industries).

• More furniture and kitchens, especially designed for shared living and communal use.

• Improving sustainability: almost all clients today ask to use sustainable materials and products as a prerequisite to build the space. It's not just a marketing point anymore – it's an amazing transition for the industry and point of distinction compared to traditional residential models.

• Office transformations: with the rise of work-from-anywhere, a tide of offices are transforming the space into new opportunities. Shared living is exceptionally well-positioned to replace these spaces. (You can read more here.)

Are you reimagining the ways people live, work, and share? Opening or expanding new kinds of shared living projects?

We work with pioneering companies who are reimagining today’s habitats and how the right environments can build magnetic, thriving, self-sustainable communities.

If you share this vision, we’d love to connect and build them together.

Connect with us here:

➞ hello@cutworkstudio.com