Modern Longhouse for Bikers Concept

This idea has been bouncing around my head for awhile. Ever since I read Beowulf I have been fascinated by the idea of longhouses. The idea that people used to feast together in on big room, and then sleep on the benches they had feasted on. That is one-togetherness. Still, our culture is quite a bit more individualistic than that. So I have wondered about ways to build a longhouse that keeps the advantages while still letting nuclear families have their own space.

So this is the concept I have come up with. It has four small apartments, each with their own kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and living room. North of the apartments is a massive common area. It could be used as a shop, a gym, a dining room. Anything a little community could want. Off at the far end of the common space is a big commercial kitchen for the big food processing projects. The common area is lit by big clerestory windows on the south side. You could put more storage space or more living units on the north side of the building. Maybe smaller spaces like a library. But I wanted to show the minimum plan for this concept. I suppose the truest minimum would just have two living units.

Anyways, this seems like it would be great for an extended family or a tribe of bikers or any group that could use a large indoor space right next to their dwellings. What do you guys think?

I like it!
I have had similar schemes myself, but only the beds rooms were separate.
You could slice this all kinds of ways, but a big shared space can make tiny private spaces more bearable.

I've often thought, a tiny house would be fine, if I had giant barn to go with it!

Personally speaking... If I'm able to work out the whole two years for the Deep Roots plan at Wheaton Labs, this is definitely something I'd look into building. The apartments could be SEPPer dwellings or something like that, unless boots were interested in living there.

What I would like is to find a way to make the extension of the common room and additional bedrooms modular. I'd start with a single apartment, the kitchen, and a portion of the full Common Room. Afterward, focus on expansion. Integrate the ability to start with one segment of the full plan, then build upon it and add more apartments one at a time, as well as a proportionate area of Common Room.

It would take someone like me waaaaaay too long to build the full four-apartment unit, but it's certainly an ideal towards which one should strive.

Stephen B. Thomas wrote:What I would like is to find a way to make the extension of the common room and additional bedrooms modular. I'd start with a single apartment, the kitchen, and a portion of the full Common Room. Afterward, focus on expansion. Integrate the ability to start with one segment of the full plan, then build upon it and add more apartments one at a time, as well as a proportionate area of Common Room.

That would be really cool! If you were timberframing it, I suppose you could aid modular expansion by installing oversized posts on the end where you plan to expand. Cut the joint facing your current construction, and then maybe leave most of the wood facing your future construction. It can be jointed whenever you build the addition.

I like the whole idea of looking at former societies to see what worked for them. It is worth noting that The indigenous peoples of North America also build Long Houses. I like the modular concept - you could add personal units as needed, and even remove them and move them elsewhere.

From time-to-time there have been places where Artist/Artisans have had little shops side-by-side with living spaces in back.

I had an idea sort of like this, where we'd buy a house on land, but the structure would be kitted out as entirely common space -- entertaining, meeting, cooking, project, cellaring supplies, etc. And then we'd build tiny-houses around it for the community members (in my plan it was each more members of the family, but whatever). And those structures, could come and go as needed if they were built for it. I like the basic idea.

I think that as a co-living arrangement ala intentional communities, it could work as one unit among others. It is something that an intentional community could start with, and expand as needs dictated.

There's an old elementary school down the street from me in the town I grew up in, that is currently being used as an "events center" when it could be so much more. It is a round building with the kitchen and gym in the center, and classrooms on three-quarters of the outside. Those old classrooms and offices could be very nice apartments, and the gym/cafeteria could be the community space.




It's a sound concept.

j

I'm loving all of these ideas.  I think my husband and I might be able to handle living in a tiny house, or tiny longhouse apartment,  if there was enough commonspace that was functional.

ByTown Timberworks in Vermont raised a timberframed Viking Longhouse several years ago. It is gorgeous.

Timberframe HQ blogpost

This facebook video shows two apartments facing each other across a large shared garage space. In this case, the grandparents and great grandparents of the family live in those apartments. So they have a single-story covered entrance. The video shows some of the advantages of multi-generational living.

Family compound video