What if you could build a big house and fill it with your friends, children, grandparents, babysitters, and anyone else who makes your life rich and full and you all owned it together? For many people, it sounds like a dream; for a developer or a bank, it sounds like a nightmare—or at least a major financial risk. But architects at French 2D, a Boston firm helmed by sisters Anda and Jenny French (above), have made it possible. Their new Bay State Cohousing community just north of Boston in Malden, Massachusetts, combines 30 apartments in a three-story building with shared outdoor space and exterior walkways around a semienclosed courtyard. It has an attached “common house” with a shared kitchen, living and dining room, and spaces for art and music. Flourishes are minimal, but plentiful shared decks create overall texture—and the whole thing was developed entirely by residents.

Getting it off the ground wasn’t easy: Over seven years, the architects had to draft a city council ordinance to make it legal (because of a local building moratorium and zoning issues), and residents had to do some savvy financial footwork. Here, Jenny and Anda tell us what it means to design such “strange” housing and what this project could mean for the future of cohousing.

You say on your website that you focus on “strange housing types.” Could you describe what that is?

Anda French: Strange projects are ones where either we need to advocate for a change in the zoning code to make them possible or we have to think differently about an existing code to take away some of the layers of financial risk to allow projects to be experimental.

Jenny French: We’re trying to find progress in something a bit unsettling—uncovering the ways we’ve constructed how we are used to living together and putting forth these kinds of exceptional models that find opportunities that are not what people are paying attention to.

Who are the clients for the Bay State project?

JF: They’re zero to ninety-four years old. The founders lived together in college in an alternative coed frat at Brown, and they missed that. There are also retirees, schoolteachers, nurses, a few people who connected because they have MS and they were looking to live with some of the friends who have been so vital to making their lives work. And also people who never had grandkids, who wanted them, who now pick up other people’s children from school. Some connected with the founding group through Cohousing.org, a clearinghouse for these types of projects.

AF: It’s a lot of people we know who live in our neighborhoods, who thought, We could intentionally put some of the things together that we informally do now.

How does a big group of friends finance a project of this scale?

AF: The financial model is interesting. It wasn’t invented in this project, but it’s rare. You get a group of people who pool early equity into the project and collectively take out a construction loan to build. Twelve to fourteen million dollars have to be pooled together from thirty household finances. As soon as the building is finished, the construction loans close, and then each member has enough collateral to individually buy into the project in the form of a mortgage on what is legally a condominium. And that’s a precarious moment, because the building’s value must prove that the equity is there for them to be able to take the mortgage out.

So there are “equity partners” who combined their funds for the initial capital to get the loan to construct a building with thirty units. What if there aren’t enough residents who can put forth the capital to be an equity partner? Or those without the cash?

AF: There were equity members who had put in significant parts of their savings. Some of those members were covering the cost of the other units, and some of that capital was trying to build in the potential for rental units or keeping some units affordable. It only works through this consensus model where they trust each other with their finances, and some of them covered for each other. It’s really beautiful.

Having to accommodate diverse incomes, how did you keep costs low?

JF: We kept the final cost to two hundred and sixty dollars per square foot. The biggest cost was the mandatory underground parking. The things that got cut out were material things that residents could add in later, like a roll-down screen at their kitchen pass-through. But the building’s arrangement and semiopen courtyard, corridors that were almost entirely avoiding double loading—some of that was so baked in that it was not on the table to be cut.

It must have been hard to design with so many people at different stages of life, with different personalities. How did you create design consensus?

AF: We worked with a room full of sixty residents, and we asked them to think about what their minimums and maximums were in terms of what they thought they needed in their living spaces.

“We’re trying to find progress in something a bit unsettling.”
—Jenny French, Architect

What were their minimums and maximums?

JF: People started to pick out things typical of a mansion—double sinks, a dining room that could seat their twelve-person Thanksgiving dinner, a kitchen island that you could sit around. We did the quick math, working backward with their construction budget and what it would allow them to build: Any meals with more than six people could go to the common space; you don’t need an office, because you’re going to go use the multipurpose room. People understood that they could carve out some of their expectations to map onto what was financially feasible for them. The common house became the perfect mechanism to say there’s a different version of that life you could have.

How might these communal spaces build value for residents, and how might that value translate into reducing the financial risk for future cohousing projects? Do you think they will be more replicable in the future?

JF: Something that could be replicated is this idea that at every apartment scale, from studio to three-bedroom, we bring down expectations about square footage. And to think about where a community doesn’t need to have a generic lobby and party room, like so many apartment buildings do, but instead can leverage communal space to do all of the things that make a full community life.

AF: If the postoccupancy data shows that people find more community or there are health benefits in coliving, there’s proof in that pudding, and you can replicate it. That becomes part of the inception of new coliving projects: It’s not just the square footage that creates value; it’s the intertwining of social spaces with smaller square footages that produces real value and comfort. The more that we build cohousing, and our colleagues build, the more that we can point to other projects, the more that that chips away at the risk-averse nature of capital in housing.

Top photo by Christopher Churchill

—

Head back to the March/April 2024 issue homepage