30 Families Wanted to Build a Home Together. Two Architects Tell Us How They Made It Happen

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.