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residents adhering to legally binding bylaws. Yet with cohousing, there is one critical
difference.

“We are our own board, since most cohousing communities operate by consensus,” says Karin

Hoskin, executive director of the Cohousing Association of the United States and a resident of
Wild Sage, a cohousing community in Boulder, Colorado. Though typically not required,
residents are expected, or at least encouraged, to attend the group dinners and pitch in where

they feel most comfortable: maintaining the grounds, for example. When it comes to finalising
decisions about maintaining common areas, or questions like noise levels in public spaces, the
entire community must agree. The objective, Hoskin says, is to regain a lost sense of
community.

“I know all of my neighbours,” she says. “If I need to borrow some eggs, I know which houses I
can go to where they’ll probably have eggs. If they’re not home, there is a good chance I’ll
have a key to their house. It’s really reminiscent of old-fashioned neighbourhoods.”

Cohousing can be traced to
Copenhagen, Denmark, where
the first “living communities”, or
bofaellesskaber, opened in 1970.

A decade later, two architecture
students, Charles Durrett and
Kathryn McCamant, were on a

year abroad at the University of
Copenhagen. During Durrett’s
daily commute through mundane
suburbs, he noticed one complex
that stood out.

Feed into: communal dining in Copenhagen “People in this one development
(Lange Eng Cohousing Community)
were always out there talking to
each other, sitting at picnic tables

drinking tea. There were children running from house to house, and people coming and going
to this building, the common house, where nobody lived and apparently everybody lived,” he
recalls.

Durrett and McCamant later married and, in 1984, returned to Denmark to learn more about
the concept. In 1988, they self-published a book on the topic, and three years later built
America’s first cohousing community, Muir Commons, in Davis, California. Since then, their

Nevada City, California, firm, McCamant & Durrett Architects: The Cohousing Company, has
designed 55 cohousing communities across the US, with more in development.

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