What we learned from a 3-month co-living experiment

Harmony & belonging in Andalusia

The Andalusian mountains are so beautiful

Nati & I just wrapped up a 3-month experiment: we rented a big house in the south of Spain for co-living & community-building events. For a long time, we’ve talked about owning a retreat centre. This experiment was a test: is the idea feasible economically? do we actually enjoy the lifestyle? Short answer: yes! and yes!

It went better than I could have hoped for, so in this blog I’m going to reflect on the experience to see if I can identify any generalisable lessons. There’s a lot of ground to cover in this blog, so I am going to just throw down a lot of reflections and hopefully some of it is useful to you as you think about your own community-building experiments.

When we first arrived in the house, we set our intentions. Mine was to create a space where anyone who had ever felt like an orphan or an outcast could come in and truly feel they belonged in the group. I don’t think we achieved this 100%, but I’m proud of how much hospitality we were able to extend over this 3 month period. It was immensely satisfying, and gave me a lot of confidence to proceed with more ambitious plans.

Facts & Figures

The venue is called El Almendrillo, a lovely old farmhouse with capacity for 20 people. It’s in a remote mountain location with poor public transit links, meaning we spent a lot of time driving people around & a lot of money renting cars. It also meant we had epic beautiful mountain views and the house & landscape contributed hugely to people’s enjoyment of their visit.

We hosted 4 paid events, attended by 67 guests, with 96% occupancy (i.e. we nearly sold out). Between events, people joined us for co-living: people we didn’t know so well were invited for up to a week, and some close friends stayed for a month or two. For this period we averaged 6 or 7 people at a time (33% occupancy). In total we had 79 visitors.

Each of the events were 4-nights. One was more “professional”, with people paying €1500-2500 for a ticket. The others were more lowkey, with tickets between €200-500. All of our events are priced on a sliding scale so people with more income contribute more, making it more accessible to people with low income. Co-living guests paid €200-350/week (all inclusive)..

Nati & I were left with a €5k profit for the co-living period, and about a €10k profit for the 4 events we facilitated. €15k for 3 months is not an amazing salary for two people, but considering all our living expenses were covered, and the work is satisfying, it’s quite doable.

I start by mentioning the financial model because that is one essential ingredient for a happy house. Running a project like this inevitably involves a lot of work: cleaning, driving, grocery shopping, coordinating, etc; if we were not getting paid for our time I am sure I would have become resentful.

So one critical success factor was good budgeting: we anticipated expenses and baked in enough margins to account for contingencies (like the €300 scratch I put in the rental car, or another €300 to upgrade the internet connection). It also meant we could afford to be generous with discounted stays. So this prototype proved the financial feasibility of the venue: if we were doing this permanently, it looks like we could bring in enough money to pay for a mortgage plus a small wage for someone to manage the place.

House Harmony

For an experiment like this to work long term, it’s crucial that you can maintain good relationships between housemates. With 8 long-term residents and 79 total guests, I was surprised by how well this worked.

I think this was partly due to how we work with authority: Nati & I generally operate in a highly collaborative way, but we were clear for this experiment that we would hold ultimate authority for the project. We decided on which venue to hire, what events to run, who was invited to participate, and how to manage the finances.

I think the main thing we did to contribute to a harmonious house was just inviting the right people. All the longterm residents were people we know well; 90% of the guests were people we had met before, and the final 10% were friends-of-friends.

By “authority” I don’t mean authoritarian. It’s about who holds ultimate responsibility for the mission-critical decisions, and who are the central nodes in the trust graph. I suspect things would have been more complex if we had launched with a group of 6 or 8 people with equal stake in the project, rather than just the one married couple with close alignment in vision & approach.

One of the reasons we had such little conflict in the group was that everyone who came put a lot of trust in me and Nati specifically, so we were implicitly empowered to have a strong influence on the group dynamic. If we proposed a system to help coordinate the group, we generally could expect very little push-back, as people trust our good intentions and substantial experience in collective organising.

Good Systems

One of my operating principles for this project was “resentment-minimisation”. This means being sensitive to small frustrations and proposing systemic improvements early, before the tension builds into dissatisfaction or conflict. For a project like this to succeed, it has to be minimally annoying. When you’re hosting 79 people over three months, there are endless opportunities to get annoyed!

For most of the time, we had 3 of us in the hosting team: me, Nati and our collaborator Gui. Early on, we realised we needed to standardise on some systems to make things efficient. For example, communicating with guests about transport, dietary needs, and expectations; or communicating internally about which rooms were available from one day to the next. I’m particularly proud of this spreadsheet we used for tracking room occupancy (anonymised here):

Beloved spreadsheet showing occupancy per room per day

We kept the pantry stocked with food for everyone. People arrange their own breakfast & lunch, but dinner was always coordinated for everyone in the house. Most evenings we would also enjoy a beer together in the sunset to close up the work day and transitioning into “hanging out as a group” mode. The daily rhythm of sunset, dinner, cleanup, hangout provided a regular opportunity for us to check in with each other, and make small adjustments to support the group harmony.

Next to the dinner table was the “community mastery board” - a facilitation tool we learned from our friend Drew from Agile Learning Centers. This is an easy way for people to name small problems and quickly come up with solutions together, like “the downstairs bedrooms have poor sound insulation” → “let’s keep the noise level down in that part of the house between 10pm and 8am”.

This was an essential tool for us to deal with tensions: proactively asking people to name small frustrations as soon as they arise, so they don’t accumulate. The participatory nature of this exercise also increases people’s sense of ownership in the space, as they can see the group respond to their requests.

Most of the practical chores were shared informally amongst all the housemates. At one point I noticed Nati was starting to get a bit grumpy about someone not pulling their weight in the kitchen. So at this point we introduced an extremely simple system to assign tasks to people: a sheet of paper with post-it notes for each of the regular tasks, and a column for each person. It was surprising how much difference it made; there is a certain fraction of people who find it much easier to contribute when the communication is super clear and explicit so they know what’s expected of them. All the tasks were still picked up voluntarily, nobody was assigned jobs against their will. But visualising the workload creates a kind of positive peer pressure that makes it easy to see who is contributing more or less than average.

This illustrates another principle: “just-in time system design”. As experienced facilitators, there are plenty of processes and techniques we could introduce into the group. But it’s easy to add too much structure and have things feel stuffy, constricting, or tedious. So we decided early on to aim for “minimum viable structure”, trust that we could handle a lot of coordination with very little explicit rule-making, and only add formal structure when the need was self-evident.

If you were replicating this experiment, you absolutely need to have some highly organised people who enjoy designing efficient coordination systems.

Lifestyle

This kind of communal living is really different to living in an apartment with 2 people, or being nomadic (like we’ve been doing the past few years). Being a host is a lot of responsibility, and it’s a lot of relational work: none of the 79 guests simply purchase a ticket, show up, consume the experience, and then leave. I was surprised by how much energy it takes to really be present with each individual, give them the experience of genuinely feeling welcome and included in the group, being attentive to their needs without exhausting my own emotional capacity. It would be much easier to run on a more transactional B&B model – but also much less satisfying.

Daily sunset ritual = friends for life

The “co-living” time and “events” time are quite distinct modes. I love co-living, eating together every night is so cozy. Events are fun for me but they are intense, we always need a recovery period after each event, and we clear our calendar of any other obligations for days before, during, and after each retreat. Running two events in close proximity (10 days apart) was a risky move. I was eager to make the most of the space, so I squeezed it in anyway. It would have been fine, but I got sick during the time I had counted on for recovery before RichFest2, so it meant I was not as present as I would have liked to be.

One of the hardest things to deal with was negotiating with friends about who could come & when. Hospitality is one of my sacred values. I would prefer to be maximally inclusive, to bend over backwards to always make it work for the guests. But the strict 20-person capacity and coordination with so many people meant a couple times I had to be harsher than I would like. For example, denying a close friend from attending an event because they were too slow in deciding about their availability.

So those were a couple of bum notes, but overall it was an extremely satisfying experience. It’s hard to explain, but I just feel much more content, peaceful and safe when I am in a house full of people. I grew up in a household of 7 so that’s no surprise I guess. I had the best sleep I’ve had in years on the first night of the Collaborative Leadership Retreat – overhearing the hubbub of 20 new friends getting to know each other in the next room. Really I felt like quite a different person while we were in the house, happier, less anxious, less dissociated, and surprisingly, much less intellectual – I barely wrote anything, I mostly didn’t have “big ideas”, I didn’t feel the urge to intellectualise, or hang out on twitter. I learned how to enjoy small talk?!? And having so many of my friends and collaborators physically co-located with us meant I spent barely any time on Zoom meetings. It turns out I am a much better worker when I have other mammals around!

Other factors

If you’re an aspiring community-builder: I would definitely recommend you run an experiment something like this. But I should note there are other factors that enabled us to be successful.

For one: reputation. We’re well connected in multiple networks: TPOT, The Hum, Microsolidarity, and Enspiral. From my position in that web, it’s pretty easy to get an invitation in front of a few thousand people, so that takes most of the effort out of event promotion. 96% occupancy across 4 events is exceptionally high, and it’s the result of a decade of network-building internationally.

Another factor: skills for living in community. Living in a group is often fraught with conflict. You need to take a great deal of care in who is included, filtering for people with high self-awareness, interior curiosity, willingness to collaborate, ability to take multiple perspectives, exceptionally considerate, aligned in values, etc. Everyone we invited to stay with us for more than a week were people we trusted to contribute to the overall health of the group. So if you’re not sure if you have all those skills locked in, I recommend starting small and gradually escalating to more ambitious communal projects.

Read more about this model here.

What’s next?

I said this was a short-term prototype of a bigger vision. Now that we’re finishing up, I feel much more confident about doing something permanent. I think my ideal would be to live with about 6-8 longterm residents, maybe running about 8-10 big events of our own each year, and rent the space out for other people to run their own events there too.

We have a couple of big decisions to make:

1. Should we rent again, or is it time to buy our own place? The advantage of renting is that sets a hard limit on the maximum expenses we’ll encounter. Especially if we were to own an old house like El Almendrillo, we could expect an endless series of big expenses: plumbing, electrical, roofing, etc etc. But there are obvious advantages of owning our own place. For one thing, we could adapt the space to make it really amazing from top to bottom (e.g. building a sauna, setting up a designated music room, optimising the coworking setup, or just decorating each bedroom to be maximally cozy). And the other big benefit is that we would be growing an asset of our own, rather than paying off someone else’s mortgage. If we decide to buy, we will be reaching out to friends & family to invest, confident that we’ve proven the business model.

2. Should we do it as a couple, or a bigger group? I already mentioned the advantages of centralising authority in just Nati & I – decision-making is much simpler. But if we were to live with people longterm, I think that power dynamic would get less and less comfortable over time. I want to live amongst equals with full participation and co-ownership, and I also want the simplicity of having a clear decision-maker. Hmmm, we’ll give it some more thought.

Overall, I’m delighted with how the experiment played out. I hope there are a couple of people reading this blog who are motivated to run similar experiments. It seems like the perfect way to gradually escalate towards more permanent community adventures. I can specifically recommend renting El Almendrillo. The house is amazing, the owners & their helpers were all great to deal with, and you can’t beat the weather in that part of the world over the winter months.

p.s. If you want to develop your community-building skills, join one of our upcoming Microsolidarity events. Or you can book me for advice - I will love to help.