A growing, intergenerational community is taking shape at a Takaka cohousing cluster of houses.
The last few houses, including the common house, are being built in a race towards the finish line in the next few months. The ethos of the project is natural building and living in community.
Golden Bay is relatively sparsely populated, but the region's hard pressed for housing.
A cohousing meet-up with present and potential future residents of the cohousing project, Takaka Photo: Supplied
About a third of the homes in the region are empty - they’re holiday homes and people moving here for work or to live are struggling to find rentals or just to get into the property market.
Liv Scott and her husband Graeme moved to the area about 11 years ago and along with their business partner Simone Woodland started experimenting with designing tiny homes and natural builds.
This project began in 2020 after they got together with others to buy a 14-hectare property on which this cohousing cluster is now being developed.
The houses in this eco village aren't cheap at about $700,000 each. But cohousing does help with savings on living costs by sharing resources and shared spaces, like the planned permaculture gardens and a large common house.
There are 34 houses in the development, Liv tells Voices.
“It's an optimal number for cohousing. A good number of people; enough people to share the load of looking after the land, the veggie gardens and looking after the wider land and all of these different things with different working groups that have been set up.
“And it's enough people to do the work without being too many, when it comes to the community meeting so that things not things don't get stalled.”
Co-housing in a modern context was adopted in the ‘70s in Denmark, and it's been catching on elsewhere in the world. One of the biggest pluses of living in community is really the social connection.
For Liv, she's found the ideal way of life after moving to Golden Bay from the UK with her husband.
“My husband had already fallen in love with New Zealand before I met him and had fallen in love with Golden Bay. So, when we met, he was like, I'm actually going to emigrate in New Zealand. And I was like, OK, that sounds fun. Let's go.”
The idea of natural building is to reduce the amount of volatile organic (VOCs) that are in the materials or being released from the materials over time. So instead of concrete, the development is using hempcrete.
The walls are solid at 114mm thick and insulated with wool that's recycled from the carpet industry in Christchurch.
A structure built this way this can last for hundreds of years, Liv says.
“The building code says it has to last at least 50 years, but these houses have been built to a higher spec than the building code.
“So, you know, at least 100 years, there are traditional timber frame buildings that are still standing after 900 years old in Europe.
“It's a very ancient way of building, traditional timber frame, which is the heavy beams with the tree nails, which are the mortise and tenon joints and the wooden pegs, and with the hempcrete is actually a very ancient way of building.”
The common house represents the collective nature of the project and it will be the main contact point for spontaneous interactions within the community. Studies have shown it is opportunities for little social interactions in your neighborhood that increase overall happiness and decrease a sense of social isolation.
“In rural places, I think there’s still that kind of community, but this is like the next level again, and certainly in cities, it's quite different.
“You don't have that kind of same level of community with your direct neighbours and all of that sort of stuff. And I think there is a real longing for that,” Liv says.
