Living (Better) Together

In the February of Australian summer in 2018, I packed a couple of suitcases and headed into the middle of European winter to live with a stranger roughly 60 years my senior. 

The arrangement was an informal exchange: free room and board in an Italian villa just outside of Florence, in the role of a ‘companion’ to the best friend of my friend’s grandmother. This entailed some light duties – buying groceries, picking up medication, driving, gardening, keeping the kitchen clean, and basically hanging out with this lady, Claudia, who was born in 1928.

I’d never had a close relationship with someone of that generation – all my grandparents had died by my mid-teens. So I was intensely curious about what living with someone that old would be like. Would we get along? Would she be sweet and quiet? Grumpy and overbearing? 

As it turned out, I hit the jackpot. The moment I laid eyes on Claudia, I was full of admiration. As her daughter, Isa(bella) – who picked me up from the airport in a customary Fiat Panda – drove us through the gates of ‘La Lama’, I spied this seemingly fragile woman inspecting her garden in a cotton dress, cardigan and light overcoat. In the middle of a Florentine winter, somewhere under 5 degree celsius. Who was this lady, impervious to the cold, I marvelled.

Over the following 18 months my admiration grew as we became friends, spent many hours of each day together, and developed the special kind of intimacy that only flatmates share. Our relationship was built on frequent trips to the ‘Coop’ supermarket; walks around the garden visiting her favourite plants (and the spot where her husband’s ashes were illegally scattered); frank and curious conversations at our daily 11am coffee break (‘So tell me, how do you Australians clean yourselves without a bidet?’); shared guilty pleasure in our ‘sin’ drawer (which contained a ready stash of chocolate and cigarettes); and a seemingly endless production of ‘babies’ (our code name for hot water bottles).

All these small, repeated moments laid a powerful foundation for our relationship to deepen when Claudia’s health went downhill after she had a fall. My role as companion morphed into carer when she became bedridden with a fractured ankle, as she wasn’t strong enough to get around on crutches. I brought breakfast to her bed on a tray, administered eye drops for her worsening glaucoma, and washed her hair over the bathroom sink. At times I was frustrated and anxious about my abilities and fortitude (or lack thereof) in this role. However, even during this period of huge challenge (for all of us), the undercurrent of admiration continued to anchor the experience. 

Claudia maintained her spirit and some semblance of a routine, finding creative ways to stimulate and engage her mind even as her body began failing her. She got acquainted with Audible, listening to books with the same voracity she used to read them. She kept in touch with friends from all over the world, often counselling or cheering them up. We retained our 11am pausa (coffee break), turning her bedroom into a kind of boudoir-salon, frequented several times a day by Isa, often accompanied by her daughter, Claudia’s granddaughter Sofia, and punctuated by various friends and neighbours who came to visit. She ate her meals with great appetite and wound down in the evening, as she always did, by watching – or listening, really – to Un Posto Al Sole, an Italian soap set in Naples, based on our very own Neighbours. 

All who encountered Claudia in this period witnessed and gained intimate insight into the journey of ageing, and we were all affected by Claudia’s display of grace and courage. Only a few times did she reveal her sadness and frustration, a vulnerability which endeared her to me even more. As my stay in Florence came to a close, Claudia’s health didn’t improve much. It was a shock to realise that when I’d arrived in February of 2018 she’d been very active, still reading, cooking, gardening, driving and emailing. But when I left 18 months later, she was almost blind and her world a lot darker, and mostly confined to her own home, apart from medical appointments.

On my return to Sydney and reflecting on the experience with friends and family, I heard myself repeating the phrase, “it just worked so well on so many levels”. I was surprised at how easy it was to live together – and how many problems it solved – for both of us.

Claudia had empty rooms in her house, and I needed a place to stay. She needed assistance with day-to-day living with things that were easy (and fairly pleasurable, like driving) for me. She and her family cooked me delicious vegetarian Tuscan dishes – and in return, they made appreciative noises over my Indian-style lentil dahl and sweetly asked me for the recipe. The symbiosis extended to other parts of our lives. She went to bed at 9pm, after which time I was free to go out, and use the car. When I came back in the early hours of the morning after a gig, her low-level deafness meant I didn’t have to worry about waking her up.

Back in Australia, I started to wonder why other people hadn’t caught onto the concept of house sharing with someone older, whether relative or not. I’d only known one friend, ever, who’d lived with her Nanna whilst at uni, and loved the gentle retiree timetable of having dinner together at 5.30pm in front of the telly watching Wheel of Fortune. Coming from a South Asian family myself, I’d grown up seeing extended families of different generations living together – but as I got older, moving out with partners and friends was understood to be a rite of passage symbolising freedom and maturity. Living with your parents, or grandparents, was something to be avoided at all costs, or tolerated for short periods of time whilst you got yourself together and prepared for ‘real life’ i.e. bigger and better things.

Living costs, land and loneliness

Cost, though, has become a critical factor in how we live. Increased costs of living, childcare and aged care, along with soaring property prices means living individually and independently is less achievable – and for some impossible. The loneliness epidemic is also affecting more and more people, both young and old. “Multigenerational living is really how things were done in the past,” says interior designer Lisa Cini of Mosaic Design Studio, and the author of Hive: The Simple Guide to Multigenerational Living. “As people moved away for jobs or had higher incomes, families stopped living together… Interestingly enough, loneliness (in seniors) and anxiety (in children) increased.”

Flat sharing with peers aside, it is mostly true that over the past decades, we in Australia have moved towards more atomised (rather than communal) living arrangements. Despite a good proportion of our population hailing from cultures where multigenerational living is common, individualised Western/British/American norms appear to have largely superseded these customs. 

But now, our living arrangements are increasingly shaped by economic factors. While “a diverse family home is often a healthy family home,” as Andrew Maynard of Austin Maynard Architects says, “multigenerational homes also reflect the nature of our economy and the dire consequences of housing unaffordability.” 

Whatever the underlying reasons, with non-nuclear households on the rise, architects and designers are helping to shape physical environments that enable us to live well with each other across generations.

Come together: Communal living

Communal living as a model has almost infinite forms, from actual communes to German Baugruppen and dual-key access living popular in Singapore. The Vindmøllebakken project in Stavanger, Norway, by Helen & Hard, for example, is a co-housing model they call ‘Gaining by Sharing’. It aims for economic, social, environmental and architectural gain through a redistribution of private and shared spaces, designed ‘to attract and suit all ages and life situations’. And whilst primarily housing people aged 55+, the Amstelveteranen co-living project by Heren 5 similarly encourages multigenerational relationships by providing family guest rooms for sleepovers – and a giant slide in the communal garden that delights both young and old.

The property belonging to my dear friend, Claudia, was one such communal living set up. The large home where she and her husband had raised their two children had been subdivided into four ‘apartments’ when her husband had died. The property also hosted an additional two residences – an old horse stables building that had been beautifully converted into a home by Isa and her husband, Guerrando; and a small ex-caretaker’s cottage. Each household was individual, with separate doorways and schedules. However we were all aware of each other’s coming and going due to the mechanical creaking of the heavy electronic gate at the property entrance; and the grounds were shared spaces where we would meet each other incidentally. All the homes looked over the large orto (vegetable garden), which was seen on archival records from the 16th century, when La Lama was most probably a resting place for travelling monks heading up into the Tuscan hills. Still, the orto acted as an internal courtyard and meeting place. We’d come across our neighbours on the benches strategically positioned to catch the brief winter sun, throwing a ball to exercise the dog, or picnicking with the children on a rug on a summer afternoon. There was a sense of community – we asked after each other’s health, swapped stories about the cinghiale (wild boar) that snuck into the property at night to steal veggies from the garden beds, wished each other Buona Pasca and Buon Natale, and once a year pitched in to manually harvest the 88 olive trees on the property.

This neighbourly experience has some relation to the popular, prolific and multi-award-winning Nightingale housing communities in Australia. The model includes shared amenities like common laundry and rooftop garden, that reduce both size and cost of individual apartments – with the added benefits of incidental social interaction. Hip V. Hype have also discovered in their iterative multi-residential design and development process that when placed on the building exterior, naturally lit walkways and staircases can encourage not just more healthy daily staircase use, but also increased positive ‘bump ins’ – that dark, internal corridors and lifts cannot.

A private view; the sound of silence

Modulation between private and shared spaces is a key dynamic in all homes – and particularly in co-living situations like intergenerational living. When redesigning a family home into a duplex for two household units, Sydney architects SAHA took a firm approach to separating shared and private, though there is permeability between the households, with child-caring for example. 

“Whilst there are some options for multigenerational living that might have had more blurred lines, we wanted it to feel quite clear what belonged to each generation,” explains Harry Catterns, one half of the practice’s partnership. With the original downstairs structure remaining the home for the older generation, the second generation’s residence was placed above. A shared entry loggia, laundry and maintained garden provide opportunities for ‘bump ins’, whilst internal decks provide private outdoor spaces. By stacking the residences above each other and using solid balustrades, direct sightlines are restricted and a sense of privacy maintained. Noise transfer between the two residences was also limited by creating completely separate floor and ceiling structures.

Multigenerational homes have become a theme of SAHA’s work, and while having four (or more) clients instead of one or two can get complicated, it’s something they are seeing more demand for, and are vocal advocates for. “Co-living is something we really value,” says Harry, who lives in a co-living arrangement himself. “We both think it has intrinsic value to the people who are living communally, as well as broader social benefits that come with fitting more people into areas with existing services and amenity.”

Untold benefits

After returning to Sydney in 2019, I spoke to Claudia a few times on the telephone but only saw her once more, when I visited La Lama after international travel opened up again post-Covid, in 2022. Completely blind by then, she was spending most of her time in the house, with a daily chaperoned garden walk and perhaps a small sit in the sun, but still enjoyed meals with the family, chats about world events and swapping personal stories, with lots of gentle teasing and familiar joking thrown in. After a long and beautiful life, Claudia died on Boxing Day last year (2023) in her bed after her morning cup of tea, modest and elegant as she always was.

Living with her was a formative experience for me personally, shaping an interest in intergenerational households, inspiring an academic dissertation – and perhaps more importantly, cultivating a sense of appreciation and compassion for older people and the ageing journey. While economic realities may compel us to live more intergenerationally, I believe the emotional – dare I say spiritual – impacts are as rich as any dollar savings. The friendships, experiences and the ‘Italian family’ I gained from living with Claudia continue to enrich my life in untold ways, and in these connections she lives on.