16 Houses For The Perfect Commune & The Rules To Keep Them Going, April 2026

Last month we launched this feature, Houses for a Commune. When I put it out on Instagram, the response was riotous, so many of you feeling exactly the same way, wanting to start your own village. Many said it was their retirement plan, though I'm not sure we should wait that long. I'll come to that.

My own mind keeps returning to this idea because, like many of you I suspect, I find the world slightly frightening. What a mad thing to say when I sit in a terraced house in Shepherd's Bush, lucky enough to have my rubbish collected, water from the taps, milk in the fridge, and a functioning loo. But no one is entirely immunised against the outside world, or against those who seem hell-bent on threatening our existence, whether it's world leaders threatening to destroy entire nations, or tech billionaires inserting themselves and their devices into every corner of our homes and, at some point presumably, ourselves. It produces in me a permanent feeling of being on guard, of fending off the claws of something just beyond the front door.

I'll grant you this is not a moderate position. I listen to the news throughout the day, which should probably be made illegal, and come from a family whose conversations, try as we might, always collapse back into politics. So yes, the above is rather obsessive and gloomy. But I don't think I'm entirely alone.

Scrolling through the comments under that Instagram post, you could see the longing. People aren't just drawn to the idea of shared costs or a bigger garden, they're clamouring for closeness, for something that feels like more than an endless rat race. As mentioned above, many said it was their retirement plan, though one commenter made the excellent point that you'd want to mix the ages deliberately, so that the caring of the elderly and the young is spread across a wider range of people rather than falling to a few. Another question that kept coming up, and rather a pressing one, was what happens if you want to leave, or the more permanent end- die.