BetterTogether: Co-Living in Rotterdam Built Around a Central Courtyard

What if the house itself could teach its residents how to live together? In Rotterdam, a narrow townhouse proposal answers that question by organizing domestic life around a vertical courtyard that stitches four floors of shared kitchens, communal play areas, and private sleeping nooks into a single breathing organism. The house is not zoned by function in the conventional sense. It is zoned by degrees of togetherness, from a ground floor kitchen that spills onto the street to compact bedrooms wrapped in timber and translucent rice paper curtains.

Designed by Kiara Helk, BetterTogether received an Honorable Mention in the Nano Nest 2020 competition. The project accommodates up to eight residents: two seniors, two parents, two children, and two guests, all living as a chosen family within a single co-living structure. Set in a city whose culture already prizes openness, shared festivals, and vibrant sidewalk life, the design takes Rotterdam's social fabric and folds it into architecture.

A Narrow Facade That Opens to the Street

The physical model reveals the project's street presence: a narrow facade slotted between masonry volumes, with vertical glazing that exposes the interior life of the house to passersby beneath trees. This transparency is programmatic, not decorative. The ground floor kitchen can extend into the public realm during summer, turning the threshold between house and city into an active social zone. Pedestrians become potential guests, and the sidewalk becomes an extension of the dining table.

The floor plans across four levels show how the narrow footprint is organized with stair circulation running along one edge, freeing up the remaining width for rooms that shift between private and communal use. Each floor balances quiet areas for seniors with social zones for children and parents, ensuring the house accommodates different daily rhythms without forcing anyone into isolation or constant interaction.

Stacked Floor Plates and the Central Void

The exploded axonometric drawing is the project's clearest diagram of intent. Four floor plates hover above one another, connected by a central stairwell that doubles as the spatial and emotional core of the house. This vertical courtyard is not merely a light well. It is the mechanism that gives every room visual continuity, natural ventilation, and a sense of belonging to a larger collective volume. Natural light filters through internal voids, creating an airy atmosphere even within a dense urban site.

The strategy is legible: by pulling the circulation and the courtyard into the center, the perimeter walls can be given entirely to living spaces. This is how a narrow townhouse manages to feel generous. The stacking logic also supports the project's intergenerational program, placing quieter uses on upper levels and more public, social functions closer to the ground.

Compact Bedrooms Where Furniture Does the Work

The interior view of a compact bedroom shows exactly how BetterTogether resolves the tension between communal living and personal retreat. A fold-down bed extends from timber-clad walls, flanked by textile surfaces that soften the room acoustically and visually. When folded away, the bed disappears, and the room converts into a workspace or a reading nook. Transformable furniture that shifts between bed, desk, and closet gives each resident a flexible retreat within the larger collective framework.

Privacy here is achieved not through heavy partitions but through material intelligence. Translucent rice paper curtains allow light and air to pass freely while maintaining visual separation. The palette of regional wood, lime plaster, and standardized glass elements keeps the build durable and budget-friendly, a deliberate choice that makes the co-living model replicable rather than bespoke.

Twin Units and Planted Terraces at the Section Scale

The section drawings and model diagrams reveal a second layer of the project's urban thinking: two adjacent narrow units share outdoor terraces punctuated by planted trees. These terraces extend the communal logic beyond the interior, offering residents open-air gathering spaces at different levels of the building. The planted courtyard visible in the section drawing, with floating timber stairs and vertical balusters running alongside it, confirms the courtyard as the house's true center of gravity.

At the scale of the section, you can see how the passive design strategy works. Large glass facades and the open central void maximize sunlight penetration even on a tight urban plot. A polyester fabric membrane on the facade provides both privacy and light permeability, filtering the boundary between inside and outside without closing it off. The straightforward cubic structure keeps construction logic simple, reinforcing the argument that co-living architecture does not require heroic engineering to be spatially rich.

Why This Project Matters

BetterTogether stands out not because it invents a new building type but because it takes the co-living concept seriously enough to design for it at every scale: from the fold-down bed to the street-facing kitchen to the twin-unit urban block. The intergenerational household of seniors, parents, children, and guests is not presented as a utopian fantasy. It is supported by specific spatial moves, including modular furniture, a light-delivering courtyard, and graduated zones of privacy and sociability.

In a moment when cities like Rotterdam face increasing density and housing pressure, the project offers a credible alternative to the single-family home and the anonymous apartment building alike. By rooting its design in Dutch cultural values of openness and communal life, Kiara Helk makes a persuasive case that architecture can do more than house people. It can organize the way they care for one another.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Kiara Helk

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Project credits: BetterTogether by Kiara Helk Nano Nest 2020 (uni.xyz).