The Cohousing Network welcomes the Postlip Community: click here for their network homepage.

In 1968, two families who had been running a bulk-buying cooperative started to think about other ways of sharing. We wanted space, facilities and support to pursue the bees in our individual bonnets. We believed in being together but felt that everyone needs private space, so we dreamt of creating separate family homes within a cooperative setting. We'd accidentally invented cohousing!

So we searched for other families with compatible dreams, and for a large country house where we could grow food and flowers, paint and sculpt, write novels, work on inventions, give our children opportunities and freedom, make wine and drink it, have parties and fun together, and create somewhere special to live. We spent 1969 in growing the group, refining our ideas and eventually discovering Postlip Hall, a mainly-Jacobean Manor House with fifteen acres.

Almost 40 years later, Postlip is eight family 'units', each a separate home. We work the organic two-acre kitchen garden and grounds communally (with the help of WWOOFers) and use the Great Hall for shared meals, public events, parties and whatever. People move between privacy and communality. We eat together regularly but not constantly, meet often enough to share ideas and make decisions about practicalities, and are casually into one another's homes much of the time.

We're a Housing Association, keep minutes and accounts, and manage to stay solvent. People hold their units on long leases, so you can only join if somebody leaves and makes a unit free to be sold at an agreed valuation. This doesn't happen often but there is a two-bedroom unit looking for a new member in 2008.

There's more about us, and the unit for sale, at our website.