Cohousing & Community Housing

• Cohousing and Intentional Communities

• Co-ops, Affordable and Supportive Housing
  

Cohousing & Intentional Communities

From shared dream to buildable vision. Design services for people building homes together.

• Community design facilitation. Turning a group's shared vision into a design brief an architect can build from

• Interior design services. Common houses, shared spaces and private homes.

Community design facilitation

A cohousing community begins long before the first drawing. It begins in conversations: how members want to live, what they want to share, what home means when it includes neighbours. Somewhere in those conversations lives the design the community needs. The work is to find it with them and give it form.

Nora Bouz works with the group and its development consultant through the dreaming and deciding that comes before architecture. Together they uncover what members truly love and need, as individuals and as a community: the rhythms of their days, the gatherings they imagine, the connection they want to build, the quiet they protect, the thresholds between private and shared life.

Environmental psychology and biophilic design translate these into spatial principles: connection, nourishment, belonging.

The gap between vision and building

Every cohousing community knows how it wants to live. Few can put it into the language of buildings. That is where groups struggle most: a vision deeply felt, an architect waiting for a clear brief, and no bridge between them.

Architects receive passionate, evolving input from the households in the group, and need it distilled into something stable that speaks their language: program, space, design intent. Across North America, many architects have attempted one cohousing project and stepped away. The few who thrive are those whose groups arrived prepared.

Preparation is the difference between a community that shapes its home and one that watches its home be shaped.

What the community receives

The process carries its own value. In exploring and deciding together, a group aligns, unites and grows as a community. What the process produces endures: a design brief that carries the vision, whole, through the years of development to come. Every voice heard. Every decision traceable to shared values.

What the architect receives

A prepared client. A brief they can design from on day one. A collaborator who speaks both languages and stays at the table.

Designing together in real time: The design Charrette

At the heart of the facilitation is the design charrette: an intensive, hands-on workshop where the community designs together in real time. With sketches and materials in hand, the group works visually. It explores options, tests ideas against its values, and sees each choice as it is drawn. Agreement forms around what everyone can see, and decisions that would otherwise take months of meetings emerge in this focused workshop.

It is where a community's scattered wishes become a shared design language.

About the design facilitator, Nora Bouz

Alongside a twenty-year career in interior design, the last nine focused on wellbeing in the built environment, Nora Bouz has long been drawn to cohousing and communal living: researching their structures and forms, and studying how the built environment supports connection, multi-generational households and a working relationship with the land. She spent time at Tamera in Portugal studying its Healing Biotope, trained with Mark Lakeman through the City Repair Project, with the Global Ecovillage Network, and completed a three-month immersive programme in ecovillage design at O.U.R. Ecovillage. For a decade, the question has held steady: how space holds a community and the individuals within it, and how community shapes space in return.Full bio

Start a conversation

If your group is forming, searching for a site, or preparing to meet an architect, this is the right moment to talk, and the first conversation is at no cost.

Interior design for Cohousing & Intentional Communities

Cohousing & intentional communities address isolation, lack of support, economic pressure, and environmental impact by combining private homes with shared spaces. These intentional neighbourhoods create communities where people build meaningful relationships, support one another across generations, share resources, reduce living costs, and live sustainably.

The Design Challenge

Creating cohousing spaces requires understanding the delicate balance between togetherness and privacy, common purpose and individual expression. Successful communities foster harmony and connection across generations — from quiet conversation to shared meals, from children's play to meaningful exchange between adults, from collaborative work to celebration. The spaces must support this full range of life.

The Interior Designer's Role

While architects shape the building's structure and define how spaces flow, interior designers work within that framework and the community's vision to refine spatial planning, develop colour schemes that serve different moods and functions, select finishes and materials that communicate warmth, comfort, efficiency and reflect design values, create lighting plans that serve multiple functions and age needs, and harmoniously blend individual expression with collective identity. This work transforms architectural space into a lived, intimate experience.

The Wellbeing Lens

Wellbeing Design considers how spaces shape people’s experience, moods and lifestyle. Drawing on environmental psychology and biophilic design for sight lines that create organic connection, thresholds that support privacy gradients, sensory experiences that engage all the senses, spaces that invite intimate or casual connection, belonging that addresses cultural and age diversity, ergonomics and accessibility for all bodies, and the integration of natural elements that elevate wellness and reconnect us with nature while indoors. This is the work of wellbeing interior design within the architectural shell.

Working Collaboratively

We partner with community members, architects, consultants, project managers, and builders. Guided by the community's vision and the architectural framework, we translate intentions into detailed interior environments where every design decision serves both individual wellbeing and collective life.

The Value of Early Involvement

When interior design is engaged from the planning stage, the interior experience aligns with wellbeing principles from the beginning and works harmoniously with the architecture. This is when decisions are made that shape how spaces will be lived in for decades to come. Early involvement aligns interior details with architecture and functionality with aesthetics, supporting the private and collective life the community is building together.

Co-ops, Affordable and Supportive Housing

Interior design for affordable, co-op and supportive housing: delivered to the guidelines and the funded budget, and designed for longevity.

Scope, guidelines and documentation

• Full service from concept through detailed construction design: specification documents, high-quality 3D of selected areas, and coordination and support throughout construction.

• Work is delivered to the BC Housing Design Guidelines, universal design and the funded cost per unit.

• Specifications are standardized across unit types to reduce supplier count and cost variance, and selected for durability under high occupancy and low maintenance over the life of the building.

• Technical documentation is produced with our drafting partner, with more than fifteen years in multi-family.

Design informed by environmental psychology

This is the studio's standard, not an add-on. Beyond budget, function, and aesthetics, every design element and solution answers something deeper: how a space affects mood, how it supports the ordinary business of a day, and how it brings people together, supporting connection and belonging.

In the homes. Warm, comfortable and welcoming, with room for residents to make them their own. Design is what carries that, at any budget.

In the shared spaces. Inclusive community hubs, designed for organic encounter, for connection, and for a sense of belonging.

Supportive housing

Trauma-informed design is a standard the space is held to, shaping it deliberately to support safety, wellbeing and healing by understanding and reducing the psychological triggers that can affect people who have experienced trauma. It holds up under round-the-clock staffing and heavy daily use.