Sharing with Friends is a co-housing model developed to address one of Australia’s fastest growing and most invisible cohorts of people experiencing housing insecurity: older women with modest savings or superannuation, for whom the private rental market offers little security and steadily erodes what little they have put aside. Typically, these women do not have the means to purchase a home or unit outright, nor can they qualify for a mortgage, yet they are usually ineligible for aged care or standard social housing. The model was conceived to give them another path.
Deicke Richards has been involved with the Sharing with Friends foundation since 2020 and developed the initial design concept for the co-housing proposal. Rather than aged care or conventional social housing, the model proposes what the foundation describes as an intentional community: five women, each with their own self-contained, personally owned studio, living independently but by design. Each studio has its own bedroom, living space, bathroom, and private courtyard, opening onto a shared central courtyard and a common house. The common house holds a full-sized kitchen, living room and shared laundry, and the whole residence is designed to Liveable Housing Australia Gold standard so that residents can age in place.
The residence reads as a typical suburban home, and the concept is intentionally designed to sit on a standard middle ring suburban block, making it replicable. A landscaped shared courtyard sits at the heart of the arrangement, with private open space associated with each unit balancing communal life against individual privacy.
The first Sharing with Friends project has presented several challenges across both the site and the model itself. The site is irregular in shape, bordered by an adjacent railway line carrying acoustic requirements and a moderately busy road, which meant carefully managing resident privacy while still giving the building a good civic presence. The model raised its own difficulties. There is no clear definition of this form of living under the planning scheme, and the proposal did not fit neatly within either Class 1 or Class 2 of the Building Code, so a significant part of the work involved navigating the planning, financial and legal complexities that come with a model of this type.
Deicke Richards brought a track record and credibility in this area and was able to translate an idea into a buildable concept. Our involvement continued through the process on site; while we were not engaged for documentation, we remained available to assist as the project moved forward. The intent is that the concept will extend beyond this first project to become a licensed, replicable model, enabling these communities to be introduced across Australia.
- Client
Sharing with Friends Foundation
- Location
Brisbane, Queensland
- Year
2020-2026
