‘It takes a village – and I need my village under my roof’

Emily Knight on buying a house with friends

Welcome to the second edition of EXPECTING BETTER - a series in which guests share the shift that’s brought them closer to their friends. Here, BBC producer Emily Knight reveals why buying a house with her husband and their friend has created the communal living setup she always craved.

When I tell people about my living situation, I like to lead with humour; I say I live in a filthy hippie commune with my friends. The reality is rather different. I live in a four-bedroom Victorian house in east Bristol. But I choose the word ‘commune’ because what I’m really trying to say is I live with people I feel deeply connected to; people I love; people I’ve built my life around.

I've always been curious about communal living. For some people, living with friends represents a certain life stage - a stop gap until your ‘real life’ begins. But it never felt that way for me. It felt like: this is how I want to live my life, in community. It was just a question of whether I could find a setup that allowed me to do it – and the people who wanted to do it with me.

Throughout my twenties, I lived in house shares – sometimes with one or two people, sometimes in bigger groups. But when you reach the point when you want to stop renting and buy a home – if you’re lucky enough to be able to afford it - that arrangement begins to feel impossible. First-time buyers don’t tend to have deposits that stretch to spare bedrooms. And those in relationships tend to buy with their partner.

Tend to, because despite being in a happy relationship with my now-husband, Lee, it was my friend Alex who I decided to buy a house with. Lee was categorically uninterested in the property market and he certainly didn’t want a mortgage. But when a mortgage advisor told us there was an option of buying a house as a three, we realised it represented a way of affording something bigger – and with a bit of gentle persuasion (read: bullying) Alex came around to the idea.

In the end, we found a home big enough for six. A four-bedroom Victorian house, with an annex in the garden, it was a wreck. Every window was boarded up and there was a hole in the kitchen that went right down to the soil. But somewhere between fixing the leaky roof and convincing the rats to move out, our derelict house became a home. Seven years on, our household has grown. Alex, Lee and I have been joined by Tristan, Jade and Alice – and the six of us live together in a joyful collective.

We take the ‘collective’ bit seriously. The epicentre of our home life is the kitchen: it’s where we dance on Saturday nights – a tradition born in lockdown, when it was the only kind of party you could go to – and where we breakfast together on a Sunday. It’s also where we go to pick up the pieces. If one of us is going through something, the six of us will gather around the kitchen table - ready to listen, ready to help. But the beauty of living with friends is that anyone can withdraw when they want to.

I think this, more than anything else, is the biggest misnomer about communal living – and the thing that most people find intimating: that you never get to be on your own. I describe myself as being a sociable introvert; I need a lot of time to myself. For me, that looks like listening to podcasts or playing Solitaire in my room. That Lee and I have separate bedrooms means I can choose to spend time alone, as a couple or with friends who I feel deeply bonded to. Having that space that’s mine and mine alone feels psychologically important; it's time spent alone, but it’s never lonely.

In this sense, I feel like I’m straddling two worlds. I have a life partner, we are married and we live together. But with all the love and respect to him, I don't want to live with just him and he doesn't want to live with just me. Living alone would put a huge amount of pressure on what is an incredibly special relationship. By living with friends, we get to experience a unique kind of connection that would otherwise find difficult to replicate. And getting to witness his enjoyment of our living situation only adds to mine.

Lee’s a homebody – and even more of an introvert than I am; the kind of person who’ll put off getting ready for a party until the last second, then ask you if he really has to leave the house. I think a lot of people are like this: they just love being in their home environment. It’s one reason we talk about there being an epidemic of loneliness – the reality for most people is that in order to experience social connection, you have to leave the house. The beauty of our living situation is that Lee gets to experience connection without having to get out of his dressing gown; he hasn’t had to seek it out, but friendship is happening around him.

The closest analogy I can think of is the school day – a time when you’d spend a solid eight hours in the company of your friends. That casual, almost accidental form of interaction forms the basis of our social lives as kids, but becomes harder to replicate as we get older. We experience it in our twenties - spending Saturday afternoons in the pub or hanging out at each other’s houses. But by the time we’re in our thirties, free time is increasingly spent with partners and children. When we do spend time with our friends, it’s probably involved a lot of organising, which heaps pressure on the whole thing.

I try not to be too evangelical about living this way; ultimately, I’m doing it because it appeals to me. But the idea of the nuclear family is so deeply ingrained in our society that we think of it as being correct – and any other model as being radical. It’s a theme I explored in my documentary - BFF: A Life Built On Friendship - which I made for BBC Radio 4 last year. I wanted to see if there were other people who were leaning on friendship as much as I am - and there are plenty. Hearing their stories only made me more convinced that communal living could represent a solution to some of the crises we’re facing, from the rising cost of living to the loneliness inherent in the way we live now. Then there’s the pressure that the nuclear model foists on romantic relationships – relationships that might have survived without it.

That said, even if more people did gravitate towards living this way, our housing market isn’t set up for it. For a while, I looked into setting up a co-housing scheme. Invented in Denmark in the 1960s, the idea is that you have a community that owns a plot of land, with communal living areas alongside individual spaces. But it's a huge amount of work; in addition to buying land, you’d have to get people on board who you may not know that well. In the end, we were lucky to find a way of combining communal living and home ownership. But even this house is clearly a family home, designed for parents with two or three children. Buildings for six adults – who may or may not have partners – simply don’t exist. It’s why we have a WhatsApps group where we send each other hotels for sale within a 50 mile radius; I love the idea of taking over an old hotel and gradually moving friends into the bedrooms.

At this point, I can say with some certainty that I want to live like this for the rest of my life. Of course, that relies on other people's willingness to live their life this way, too. Lee and I are very aware that any one of our housemates could get a partner, start a family and decide to move out. We joke that if we’re the ones who have a child, it will be all hands on deck. We are joking, but it’s underlined by a serious point about the way we treat parenting in our society. I think if we integrated children into our lives a little better by raising them a bit more communally, all of us would see the benefit. I take the phrase ‘it takes a village’ quite literally; in my case, I need my village under my roof.