Building a village with Philippa Young

"The more that we talk about it, the more people will realize they don't have to run through meadows or go cottage-core to be interested in communal living."

This Q&A is part of a series of conversations with people who are forging meaningful lives in a time of chaos and unpredictability. They take time and skill to produce, but I keep them available to all subscribers rather than paywalling them. If you value the themes explored in these conversations, consider upgrading to a paid subscription here. (If you’re already a paid subscriber, thanks.🙏)

Prior to Covid, I made a habit of visiting my friend Philippa every summer at her cool warehouse flat in Barcelona. Back then, we were both relatively unattached urban millennials who had a lot of time to drink rosé and talk about podcasts and feminist politics. Last month I visited her again, but this time was different — not only because we both have toddlers now, but also because she has now traded her urban life for a countryside one, living with another family in a 200 year-old farmhouse in a small village in Catalonia.

The way Philippa lives her life has always inspired me, whether it’s the creative and unconventional people that are always in her orbit, the work that she does in the filmmaking collective What Took You So Long, or her steadfast refusal to accept many of the shitty norms of modern life. As long as I’ve known her — whether she was living in London, Beirut, or Barcelona — she’s been on a perpetual quest to figure out how life can be fairer, healthier, more vibrant and beautiful, for both herself and others. The result of all that work is plain to see when you’re in her presence.

The way Philippa has intentionally structured her life these days is part of a growing trend of people who view communal living as the antidote to many of the ways that modern life is not working. As soon as I got home from Spain, it was as if I couldn’t escape the idea, whether it was that viral article about mommunes in the New York Times, woodland off-gridders escaping the 9 to 5 in the Guardian, or Ezra Klein’s super educational interview with the author of a new book on the topic.

Philippa lives with her partner Oriol and their son Wren, as well as another family: Lisa and Manu, who are both performers and musicians, and their son Ernesto, who is aged 10 and speaks five languages. Their rented house sits above their landlady’s annexed flat, who they are friendly with.

In addition to the house, there are several clearings on the property for a yurt and a caravan for visitors to stay in, a sauna, and workshop spaces for both Oriol and Manu. Philippa tends a biodynamic and regenerative garden — entirely self-taught, she grows much of the produce they eat — and meals are generally eaten together when everyone is home. When I was visiting, there were a slew of diverse visitors in the yurt area who made their way into the main house every now and then for a shower or to cook.

I know it’s so easy to read something like this and say: “Well, that sounds nice, but I can’t afford to move to Spain and become an organic farmer! This is not helpful!” I get it.

It is a privilege to even have the mental space to stop and consider your life and wonder how you might change it — let alone perform such a radical overhaul. However, it’s important to remember that the way we live now is actually the aberration in terms of the grand sweep of human history. Living cooperatively and sharing resources with other people is how humans have beat the odds of evolution, and how many people in the world still live and thrive today. It’s only recently we’ve become atomized units of productivity with our own sets of appliances and bills, closing our doors behind us each night. 

Somewhat unintentionally, this interview reads as a coda to my last essay about the difficulty of new motherhood. Because if the question everyone, including me, seems to be asking is: “Why this fuck is this so hard and how can we do it differently?” then the answer is right in front of us: Living in community. There are lots of attainable and realistic ways to enact this value system in your life, many of which we explore below.

Rosie: So let’s start with the biggest questions you get about living this way? 

Philippa: One of the things that prevents people from stepping into this is saying: How is this any different from living in a dorm or a shared house in university? I would never have wanted to live in a big flat in Barcelona – that is not my idea of communal living and is not my idea of fun in any way shape or form. 

Perhaps it’s because Lisa and Manu have a child, or because they lived in Christiania [a well-known commune in Copenhagen, Denmark], or maybe because they lived a life of traveling around in a circus as performers — but it always felt like a step beyond that. It felt like we were building and sharing a life together. 

Incredulous friends have also asked “I know you live in a big house but are there two separate houses or units?” and I’m like no, we share the same bathroom, we share the same kitchen. “Do you separate groceries, do you have separate shelves?” The answer is no. When each of us buys groceries, the understanding is we’re buying for everyone. It always works out. So those boundaries which at first glance seem very ordinary and perhaps a good idea are actually where you get into the territory of living in the university dorm or flatshare. 

R: The flat or house share is a marriage of convenience whereas what you’re doing is based on shared values. 

P: The convenience financially is certainly something to consider. We would never be able to afford to live in a masia (Spanish for farmhouse), and living in one means we have more space and land. If we lived here without another family, we would have to work so much to afford it that we would barely be living here.

R: Did you know before having your son Wren how important it was going to be for you to live in this way? 

P: Maybe it’s all the therapy or self work, but I’m very aware of what I lack in terms of my personality and my character. I know that there are things that I don't have the capacity to do as a human and as a mother that I want for my child. And I thought that living in community would mean I could look for people who were additions to the holistic framework of a good life. 

Oriol and I are both a bit antisocial, we’re not very good at gathering community. So when I met Lisa and Manu, I knew that they are musical and fun and really good at building community. I do strategically want that for my child, but I don’t want to grow into the person who actually does it. It’s too much to ask. It’s like the Esther Perel thing: You can’t be the entire village for your partner. You also can’t be the entire village for your child. So you’re either going to have to pay someone to do it, or you live with people who are going to do that with you. 

R: I wonder if your work in a non-hierarchical filmmaking collective and doing a lot of travel outside of the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) world helped normalize this for you? Did that show you how abnormal it is to take a baby home to a flat and have two parents do it mostly alone? 

P: Yes and I’ve always had a deep fear of the nuclear family in suburbia because I grew up that way. While I didn't have a bad childhood, I have almost a visceral reaction in my stomach to that being my reality. So that is part of the reason I have chosen the lifestyle and the work that I do. But of course every experience I’ve had — like visiting tribes in Papua New Guinea or nomadic camel herders in Rajasthan — all of that validates that initial feeling that something is wrong with the western model. 

R: You’re very much a working mom who doesn’t have formal childcare that you pay for. People are going to be like: Wtf … how? Can you break down your day and how that works? 

P: This has made me advocate for women partnering with artists – especially not very successful ones. [Laughs] The biggest thing is the fact that Oriol and I both work from home and have flexible, self-directed jobs. This is the only way we can achieve what we achieve. We split our day: I do work from 9-2 every day. Oriol takes our Wren until 2, then we have lunch all together, and then after lunch I’m with Wren until we go to sleep. Oriol has his afternoons, which he prefers for his creative work, and I have mornings. 

The fact that we don't commute is important, it means that I can hold down my job and I can still be with my kid. I should also say that in those moments where neither of us are available for ten minutes or an hour we have our neighbor and housemates.

R: One of the things I noticed when I stayed with you is those little moments of help add up. I needed to get some stuff from downstairs and I asked your ten year old housemate to watch my kid rather than carrying him with me. Then, when my kid decided to projectile vomit on your rug and I was super stressed about it, Manu kindly cleaned up the rug while I dealt with changing him. In the grand context of the day of taking care of a child alone, it’s those endless moments of friction that stack up into complete and utter exhaustion. So just having those release valves of pressure where someone says “here, let me help you with that” makes it feel more humane. 

P: Yes and it also does something for your child. I think if there are more people around, your child gets a very important sense of control where they can choose who they want to spend time with.  I’ve noticed that Wren has fewer tantrums and fewer moments of frustration when he’s able to just walk away from the parent figure and walk over the way to spend time with Carmen, [the landlady who lives in an annex attached to the house.] He is exercising his right and his will and his control and I think that’s really healthy and it’s healthy for us to witness and allow it

R: Let’s talk about some of the challenges. As much as I’m convinced the way I live is not working, I also feel a resistance to yours. It’s confronting because that resistance says things about me that I’m not particularly proud of. (Things like: I’m uptight, I like things to be organized at all times, I’m bad at sharing.) In other words, the things I would find difficult are petty. I’m sure some of those apply for you too. 

P: It’s only the petty things. Like for me: how someone cuts an avocado, how they pour their cereal into a bowl, how many spoons of flour they use to feed the sourdough. But I make the effort to prevent those things from having control over my life. When something comes up for me like, “this person is not doing as much as I am,” I have to notice that and I have to say “so what are they doing that I’m not doing?”

There can be bigger complaints, like how much someone else values recycling, or cleaning, or other people's property, and those issues are best dealt with through conversation and NVC (non-violent communication). But really, it's the petty complaints that take up more space and time.

For the first couple of years of living communally you are very much working on tolerating the different ways people have chosen to live. They are going to think and act differently from you. You’re living your therapy a bit by doing this. The way I've experienced it is that I am an elastic band and my tolerance gets stretched and it’s uncomfortable for a little while, eventually that just gives and it becomes easier. I just experience it as an expansion. 

R: So it’s like exposure therapy. Often in these conversations about conflict with domestic partners or flatmates or whatever, the advice is: You have to communicate better, you have to have a contract, a chore chart whatever. But what you’re saying is actually the opposite. The work is not interpersonal when that stuff comes up. The work is personal. 

P: Please no contracts! That just devolves responsibility to a piece of paper that you will inevitably forget about and only bring back as evidence when the interpersonal relationships are breaking down. I would say it is ALL personal. You've got to be really sure of the value added and you’ve got to remind yourself of it because you’ll lose perspective on it quickly as your personal needs grab your brain. And you’ve got to keep remembering everybody contributes to a community and some of those contributions are really difficult to see. 

As mothers this is something that should be really important and central to our understanding of the world because the work that mothers do is neither seen nor valued. So if you live in a community and feel like someone isn’t contributing enough, you need to look a little deeper as to what they are providing. Maybe they are the person who puts the music on and lightens the mood, maybe when you really need it they are the person who hands you a glass of wine and asks “are you okay?” 

[Editor’s note: Because I know you’re probably wondering, there is a genius system for doing the dishes. Each housemate has a little object hanging next to the sink — a dish talisman, see below. When their object is hanging first in line, it’s their turn to clean the dishes — all the dishes in the kitchen, even if they didn’t make the mess — before the day is over.]

Dish talismans

R: I want you to make the case that this sits alongside these other contemporary ideas like flexible remote work that are better for us than the existing model. Make the case that this isn’t a privileged lark for people who are able to escape their 9-5. Or, you know, for hippies. 

P: I don’t consider myself in any way shape or form to be a hippie, and yet when I moved into this shared house even my mum said something along those lines. It’s so deeply entrenched and so deeply unhelpful because it’s literally just people living together. 

The mommune article is the best real-life example of just saying you can just be whoever you want to be in a different lifestyle. You don't have to be vegan or play acoustic guitar. This is just a logistical arrangement and you can be whoever you want to be within it. I have not foregone the things that I love about my previous urban millennial persona just because I live in the countryside. I’m still going to drink a glass of rosé and talk about a series I've watched. But I can also milk a goat. There does not have to be a separation. The more that we talk about it, the more people will realize they don't have to run through meadows or go cottage core to be interested in communal living. 

R: And what about the privilege angle? It’s obviously a privilege, and that can lead a lot of people to dismiss it. 

P: It is a privilege to be able to unwind yourself out of your hyper-productive hamster wheel of life in order to just ask yourself a question: Is this working? And then, if it isn’t, to be able to take a step out of that. If you’re in a caregiving role or you have a lot of dependents – yes it’s going to be very triggering to hear someone say how great their life is now that they did this. But I see it as available to everybody in some form. And in fact, the people it actually helps the most are the people trapped in those hamster wheels.

R: Yes, so let’s address the ripple effects of this, because that’s what this newsletter is interested in. I think what you’re proposing here has huge ripple effects even beyond the immediate community you live in. It creates space for you to host more people who perhaps don’t have a place to live or belong right now. It breaks down these ideas that everyone needs to fend for themselves in their own little households. It even tackles more abstract ideas, like the fact that nobody has time to think about structural inequality or the climate crisis because they are too busy trying to earn enough money to pay for their childcare and keep their fridge stocked. It seems like living in community just creates more space for humans – space that we can use for generative, artistic, collaborative, and yes, anti-capitalist pursuits. 

P: Yes to all that. The way that I’m doing it is not the only answer, it is simply the impulse to commune with other people. That’s it. And I do see people finding and seeking ways of communing more and more. That impulse could be starting a baby pod where you share childcare resources with four or five other families. That’s communal living. We need to break apart this concept of communes. It just means doing things with other people. It could be a community garden, it could be a knitting circle, it could be a book club. 

You’re sharing intimate space with people in a place where you’re not having to pay for something. 

R: I love all your examples because it shows you can do this in an urban or suburban life. You can make the childcare pod, you can gather your neighbors every once in a while to foster connections, you can do a meal train when someone has a baby. There are so many ways we can take care of each other because that’s what we’re built to do. 

P: It doesn’t have to be so extreme as living together, but as people want to move out of cities, this is certainly a viable way to do that. People might say that’s not for me, but I also want to point out that I’m really introverted and I really need a lot of private time and space. So this has not been easy for me either, but I just understood that I was going to get more out of it than I wasn't. I’m not the standard person who wants to live in a house share, so the fact that I've been able to do this is a testament to the potential of humans to expand like elastic bands. 

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