Our first step towards our approvals to build has come as a unanimously in-favor vote by neighbors who were present at this month’s neighborhood advisory council zoning meeting.

There’s still a good deal of work to do before we break ground, but we’re excited to have the support of our neighbors in creating K’House.

One of the things we know for sure – whether it’s at a great house party or any day at Indy Hall, everyone ends up in the kitchen socializing at some point.

That’s one of the reasons that we think of the community kitchen and dining room as the centerpiece of K’House. Every apartment gets its own kitchen, but we think we’ll have some incredible interactions happen by providing a kitchen and dining room that’s big enough for everyone to cook and eat together, including guests.

Cohousing communities typically have a few planned meals together every week, and K’House will be no exception. Beyond the planned meals, though, the kitchen and dining room become a place for serendipitous meals, conversations, drinking, and other socialization.

Thanks to our friends at Wildbit for letting us shoot the video above to give you a peek into what this experience might look like!

We heard from a bunch of people that this piece had run right after the new year, but hadn’t heard it ourselves. WHYY has posted the clip, so now we can share it with you!

Instant Dinner Party

One of my favorite quotes:

“The kitchen and dining room are designed for twice as many people that live there,” he said. “So if you’re going to cook a meal for a guest or a couple of guests you’ll do it in the common space, and hope that if multiple residents are doing that it becomes an instant dinner party.”

Read the rest or listen to the clip.

There’s 50 new trees going into the neighborhood near the K’House and we’ll be heading up to meet some neighbors and help out. All are welcome to join and volunteer! If multiple people want to leave from Indy Hall, we can coordinate traveling from old city together, just drop a line in the comments or email alex@indyhall.org.

Details:
November 19th, 10 am – noon, rain or shine

Meet at 1314 North 4th Street

Help our neighborhood Tree Tenders plant another 50 trees in the neighborhood!
All experience levels welcome. Kids and teens welcome. Gloves and tools, coffee and donuts provided.

Contact Lisa at greening@ksnac.org or 215-370-0099 with any questions.

Volunteers with trucks needed! 
Got a truck? Want to help plant trees? We need your help on November 19th! Contact Lisa at greening@ksnac.org or 215-370-0099.

Well look at that! Indy Hall and our cohousing collaboration with Postgreen Homes & DIGSAU is one of the features in this month’s Philadelphia Magazine titled, “The Indy Hall Experiment“.

Rachel did a nice job of summarizing the K’House, with a couple of important quotes in particular:

The goal is to build relationships first, Hillman explains. “It’s not speed-dating, pressure-cooker networking. It’s organic.”

“We want to bring new positive energy to the neighborhood, but we’re just as interested in finding the great things that are already there,” Hillman says.

Nic also got a great sound bite:

“A lot of cohousing communities eat dinner together a few times a week, or other things like that. But all that stuff gets decided by the community, not by us. We just make it possible,” says Nic Darling of Postgreen. “Philadelphia is sort of stuck on the single-family row home — we like to find different ways to test that.”

Pick up a copy of the Metro or read the whole piece online here.

The name is a shortening of “Cohouse”, with the letter K as a hat tip to our new neighborhood, Philadelphia’s “Kensington South”.

Former (but forever in his heart) Philadelphian Steve Berry took interest in the project, and noticed my call for an illustration to help make it more obvious how to pronounce “K’House”.

The results are even better than I’d imagined.

Steve has an account of his process on his blog, following from where he started with tracing paper before completing the logotype in Adobe Illustrator.

A huge thank you to Steve for taking some time out of his weekend to work on this for us. I hope you’ll be able to make it to our opening next year, and there will always be a spot for you to crash in our house.

Personally, I can’t wait to get a huge version of this up on our walls in the K’House. I think I’ll be sending this over to LTL Prints sooner than later.

We’re excited to be heading into my fall, favorite season in Philadelphia, with a LOT of work to do. We’ve relaunched this website to become more of a resource than the placehold site it is replacing. We’re going to be spending more time on design and community activities as well, with the goal of having our groundbreaking ceremony early next year.

Some things to take a look at on the new website:

• Our take on cohousing, as it relates to coworking and an urban environment. And some backstory on how we got here.
• A bit of background about our concepts for the Indy Hall K’House, in their earliest stages
• Some photos from events over the summer
• Background on the neighborhood of Kensington
• Some of our favorite places to hang out near the house
• Our event calendar, which we’ll be populating with activities, and events that we’re organizing and attending.
• A discussion list, for questions, ideas, and conversation about the Indy Hall K’House
• Opportunities to be a resident, be an investor, or be a supporter/friend of the project

Yesterday we hosted Indy Hall’s second annual “Independents Day BBQ”, one more BBQ after the 4th of July Weekend to celebrate our community of Independents, on the K’House lot.

More photos are available in the K’House photoset on Flickr or in the slideshow below.