What is Common Space?

Common space: the shared areas in a coliving setup that aren't bedrooms: kitchens, living rooms, terraces, dining tables, coworking nooks, rooftops. Basically, everywhere the actual living happens.

In a hotel, common areas are lobbies you walk through without making eye contact. In coliving, they're the whole point. The common space is where you meet the person who ends up becoming your travel buddy for the next six months. Where someone teaches you to make pasta from scratch at 11pm on a Tuesday, uninvited, because the kitchen was there and the pasta was there and that's just what happened. Where the spontaneous dinner for four turns into a feast for eighteen.

A well-designed common space removes the decision to socialise. You don't have to make plans. Just show up for a glass of wine and somehow it's 2am and you've solved everyone's career problems. The design matters too. Long communal tables beat scattered armchairs. Open kitchens beat closed ones, and a terrace beats anything indoors. Good lighting after dark doesn't hurt either.

Common space is where coliving earns its name.

Why Common Space Matters for Digital Nomads

When you work remotely, your accommodation is also your office, your gym lobby, and your entire social infrastructure. The bedroom handles sleep. The common space handles everything else.

For digital nomads especially, the quality of shared space is the difference between a productive month and a lonely one. Good common space means you're never stuck in your room eating gas station snacks because there's nowhere else to go. It means a real kitchen where you can cook properly, a terrace for afternoon video calls, and a dining table big enough that pulling up a chair to an existing conversation doesn't feel like an intrusion.

The best common spaces in coliving develop a rhythm without anyone scheduling one: coffee in the morning, focused work through midday, chaotic cooking by 7pm, stories and laughing after dinner. Nobody put it in the calendar. The space made it happen.

At Casa Basilico

In Madeira, the common kitchen ran the show. Everyone had their own room, but the kitchen belonged to everyone. By day three, a rotation had formed without a single announcement: one person on morning coffee duty, someone else curating the playlist, whoever was cooking that night staking claim to the big chopping board first. The terrace table sat twelve comfortably and regularly hosted sixteen. No one organised it. The table was just there, long and inviting, and people kept sitting down.

That's the Casa Basilico theory of common space: make it good enough that staying in your room feels like the weird option.

Related Terms

Come see what a proper common space feels like. Join us at the next Casa Basilico chapter →