Why the countryside changes what coliving feels like

Urban coliving sits inside an enormous menu of alternatives. There is always somewhere else to be, so the house becomes a place you sleep and occasionally socialise. That is fine, but it caps how deep the household gets.

In mid-Devon there is no competing menu at eight o’clock on a Wednesday in January. What there is instead is a fire, a kitchen, and eleven other people. Depth is not a feature we designed. It is what happens when there is nowhere else to go.

Our season deliberately runs through the winter. Everyone assumes that is a bug. It is the whole design. Cold, dark evenings push people into the same rooms, and the season builds an intimacy that a summer of everyone scattering across the lawn never would.

Eight acres, the river, woodland, the Culm Valley beyond it. Walks that take ten minutes or four hours. A pub that knows the regulars. Enough birdsong that people comment on it in their first week and stop noticing it by their third, which is exactly the right trajectory.

You need to want this. There is no late-night supermarket, no gallery on a whim, and getting anywhere involves a car or a lift. Two hours from London Paddington is close for the countryside and far for a spontaneous evening. We would rather say that plainly than have someone arrive expecting otherwise.