10 Signs You're Ready for Your First Coliving Experience

You're ready for your first coliving experience if you've been working remotely for a while and the loneliness has started to feel like background noise you can't turn off. Maybe you've mastered the café laptop setup, you know which playlists keep you focused, and you've said "I should try coliving" approximately forty-seven times without doing anything about it. The signs are usually obvious in retrospect: you're craving real human connection, you eat dinner alone most nights, and you've stopped having opinions about what to cook because it doesn't matter when it's just you anyway. If making pasta with strangers who become friends sounds better than another solo evening, that's all the signal you need. Coliving is for people who want their work life and their actual life to happen in the same place, at the same time, with people worth sharing it with.

1. You've said "I should try coliving" at least three times this year

And then you didn't. You bookmarked some places, maybe joined a couple of Facebook groups, probably watched a reel of people eating tacos on a rooftop looking suspiciously happy. Then you went back to your apartment.

Curiosity, research, inaction, quiet regret. That loop is the clearest sign there is. What's stopping you is fear that it won't live up to the idea. That's normal. Go anyway.

2. Remote work gave you freedom, but the loneliness crept in

Buffer's State of Remote Work (2023) found that 22% of remote workers cite loneliness as their biggest ongoing struggle, and that was before the post-pandemic novelty wore all the way off (Source: Buffer).

You've got the freedom to work from anywhere. Great. You've also got the freedom to eat lunch in silence every single day, which stops feeling liberating around month six.

Coliving doesn't fix remote work. It fixes the part of remote work that nobody mentions in the job listings.

3. You have strong opinions about where you want to go but never actually go

You have a shortlist. Oaxaca. The Canary Islands. Lisbon. Somewhere in Southeast Asia. You've checked flights twice. You've looked up the coworking spots. You've done absolutely nothing else.

This is a lifestyle problem dressed up as a planning problem. If logistics were the real barrier, you'd have solved them by now. What's missing is a reason why now, and people to share it with when you land.

A first coliving experience gives you both.

See our upcoming chapters

4. You eat dinner alone more nights than you'd like to admit

This one matters more than people acknowledge. Food is social. Humans evolved eating together. Sharing a meal is one of the oldest bonding rituals there is. When you're remote and solo, dinner gets reduced to a logistical task: fuel yourself so you can keep working, or keep watching something on your laptop.

It stops being dinner.

Casa Basilico is built around communal cooking and eating. Not a marketing angle. Fabio genuinely cooks for everyone and gets unreasonably grumpy when nobody shows up to eat. 🍝

If the idea of a real shared dinner table sounds better than another solo delivery bag, your first coliving experience is overdue.

5. Your current routine is fine, but "fine" is doing a lot of heavy lifting

You've optimised. Morning routine: check. Good cafés: mapped. Work hours: consistent. Life is... fine.

Fine is fine. Fine is also boring when you suspect there's more out there. The people who get the most out of their first coliving experience aren't usually in crisis. They have a decent solo setup. They're just bored of it. They want more texture in their days.

More unexpected conversations at 2pm. More spontaneous "what are we doing tonight?" and less "guess I'll watch something." More coming home to a kitchen that already smells good.

6. You're between leases, between contracts, or just between chapters

Sometimes the sign has nothing to do with loneliness or boredom. It's just timing. Your flat lease is up in six weeks. You've just wrapped a contract. You're in that gap between one thing and the next.

Instead of locking yourself into another solo rental in another city you already know, you could try something genuinely different for a month.

MBO Partners' 2023 Digital Nomad Report found 15.5 million Americans now identify as digital nomads, with millions more globally doing some version of location-flexible remote work (Source: MBO Partners). Most of them take too long to realise they can use that flexibility for something interesting.

If you have a real window of freedom opening up, a coliving stint is one of the highest-return things you can do with it. You come back with a network, with memories, with perspective. You don't come back from another month alone in a new apartment with any of those things.

7. You've never lived with people who actually get it

Most of us have flatmates at some point. Most flatmates are people who happened to need a room, not people who've made a deliberate choice about how they want to live. They're not bad people. They're just not your people in any meaningful sense.

Coliving is different because everyone there made the same slightly strange, deliberate decision to show up in an unfamiliar city and share a kitchen with people they've never met. That shared weirdness is a fast-track to real connection.

Within a week, people know your name, your work, your terrible taste in movies, and what you actually put in your coffee. That's a lot.

How we build community at Casa Basilico

8. You think about food culture when you research a destination

If you've ever planned a trip around what you'd eat there, not where you'd sleep or what landmarks to hit, but what the food would be like, this one's for you.

Casa Basilico picks destinations based on food culture. Oaxaca isn't just a pretty city; it's one of the most interesting culinary regions in the Americas. Puglia isn't just beautiful coast; it's pasta you can't get right anywhere else. We cook together, do market runs, argue about techniques, and have dinner conversations that start with "what should we make tomorrow?" and reliably end somewhere much better.

If you consider local cuisine a legitimate reason to visit somewhere, your first coliving experience here is going to feel like coming home. Specifically: coming home to a house where someone's already in the kitchen.

Why food is at the heart of what we do

9. You have the freedom to go. You're just not using it.

Remote work promised a new kind of life. For a lot of people, it delivered a new kind of apartment.

If you can technically work from anywhere and you've been working from the same spot for twelve months straight, that's worth sitting with. Not a failure. Just a question: what's actually stopping you?

Usually it's inertia. Sometimes it's fear. Neither gets better by waiting.

Your first coliving experience isn't a massive commitment. It's one month. A test run for a version of life that might suit you considerably better than the one you're currently running. If it doesn't work for you, you've lost nothing except some excellent meals and interesting people.

10. You're reading a blog post about signs you're ready for coliving

Let's be honest. Nobody reads this kind of article out of pure academic interest. You're here because you're thinking about it. The fact that you made it this far means something.

You probably didn't need all ten signs. You knew by number three. The question isn't whether you're ready. It's whether you're going to do something about it this time, or bookmark this and come back in four months to repeat the same research loop.

We've had guests who deliberated for two years before finally joining a chapter. Every single one of them said the same thing afterward: I wish I'd done this sooner.

So what do you actually do next?

If you hit five or more of those signs (and honestly, be truthful with yourself), the move is simple: look at what's coming up and apply for a spot.

Casa Basilico runs pop-up coliving chapters in places chosen for the food, the culture, and the community they create. Groups are intentionally small. There are communal dinners. There's arguing about pasta water. There's a specific kind of warm, chaotic, food-obsessed little family that forms over the course of a month.

It's not for everyone. But if any of the above sounded like it was written about you, it probably was.

Come see what's open. Find your chapter →

FAQ

Do I need to be extroverted to enjoy coliving?

Not at all. Good coliving spaces have real private areas alongside shared ones, so you control your own rhythm. You can have dinner with everyone and then disappear to your room. Nobody's going to chase you. Most introverts who do their first coliving stint come back surprised at how natural it felt, because the shared context does a lot of the social heavy lifting. You're not performing at strangers. You're just living with people who get it.

How long should a first coliving experience be?

One month is the sweet spot. The first week, you're getting your bearings. Week two, you're finding your rhythm. By week three, it feels natural. Week four, you're quietly sad it's ending. That arc is reliable enough that almost everyone reports it. One month is long enough to settle in and short enough that the stakes feel manageable.

What if I don't click with the people?

It can happen. Chemistry isn't guaranteed anywhere. But coliving groups self-select for a certain kind of person (curious, independent, open to things), which means the baseline is usually higher than random flatmates. And because it's time-limited, even a mediocre social experience has a clear end date. In practice, most people walk away with at least a handful of friendships that genuinely stick.

Do I need to be a foodie to join Casa Basilico specifically?

You need to enjoy eating good food with good company. That's the whole requirement. You don't need to know how to cook (Fabio will teach you things whether you ask or not). The foodie coliving label means food is central to daily life: shared dinners, market trips, cooking together. You won't be tested on your knife technique on arrival.

What's included in a Casa Basilico chapter?

Accommodation, communal meals, a coworking-friendly setup, and the organised chaos of sharing space with a small group of interesting people in a city worth exploring. Exact inclusions vary by chapter. Check the chapter pages for what's in and what's extra.