One of the things I hear most often, when I describe what we're building, is the person across from me nodding confidently for a while and then saying:
"Ah, I get it. Like one of those housing setups for young workers."
"Ah, it's like Berlin, where they do apartments with a shared kitchen."
"Ah, it's a kind of residence that takes care of community a bit."
All these sentences show real, kind attention. But they're wrong. And I'd like to explain why letting them stand causes harm — not to my project, but to the whole sector.
In Italy, CoLiving struggles to grow partly because we lack the vocabulary to distinguish it from things that look like it. Every time we describe it by analogy to something existing, we confuse it with something existing. And we miss the chance to call it by its name.
So let me be clear about what CoLiving is not. It's paradoxically the fastest way to say what it is.
It is not student housing for adults
Student housing is designed around a single life phase (university), a single age range (18–26), a rigid timeframe (the academic year), and a socially homogeneous population (students).
CoLiving has none of those characteristics. The residents are 25–65 (and beyond), arrive from different paths (remote work, separation, relocation, search for community), stay from weeks to years, and look for the opposite of a campus: an environment with mixed stories, mixed experience, mixed generations.
Confusing CoLiving with student housing means thinking we're "extending the university into life." We're not. It's a different kind of project, with a population that wouldn't want to live in student housing — because they've already done it, or because they've outgrown it, or because they want to live next to people who aren't only their peers in transition.
It is not a residence with a community manager
A residence (or aparthotel) is designed around individual self-sufficiency for the long term. Private apartment, private kitchen, autonomous entrance. Sociality is non-existent or incidental.
Adding a community manager to a residence does not turn it into CoLiving. It turns it into a residence with a community manager — someone who organizes a few aperitivi that stay sparsely attended, because the building doesn't support them.
CoLiving is not a service layer added to an individualist building. It's a building designed differently, where community is the structure, not an event.
It is not a shared kitchen
This is the most widespread misunderstanding, and it gives this article its title.
Yes, in a CoLiving the kitchen is usually shared. But CoLiving is not the shared kitchen. It is many other things at the same time, and the kitchen is only one of the points where those things show up.
Thinking of CoLiving as "a place with a shared kitchen" is like thinking of a restaurant as "a place with tables." Technically true, substantively misleading. What makes a restaurant work isn't the tables — it's the kitchen team, the service, the menu, the attention, the staff, the customers who come back. The tables are obvious.
The same goes for CoLiving. The shared kitchen is obvious. What makes it work is the active presence, the community manager, the careful selection of who joins, the weekly ritual, the spaces that invite you to stay, the included services, the kind of people who are welcomed in.
It is not a hostel for digital nomads
The term arrived in Italy through international digital-nomad experiences (Bali, Lisbon, Medellín). Confusing CoLiving with digital-nomad housing causes harm.
Digital-nomad living is designed for short stays (1–4 weeks), people in continuous travel, life predominantly in English, leisure mixed with work. It's valid. It's a niche.
The CoLiving we're building in Italy has a different horizon: people who want to put down roots — at least temporarily — in the country where they live. Who care about the neighborhood, the everyday, the recurring encounters. Not the trip. Not the next destination.
It is not a prettier shared apartment
A shared apartment (the classic "room in a flatshare") is an informal arrangement between private parties — no management, no services, no design of the context.
CoLiving is a structured service.
Adding nicer furniture to a shared apartment doesn't make it CoLiving. It makes it a better-furnished shared apartment.
The category jump happens when management enters the picture, when the experience is oriented, when the rhythm of life is curated, when services are real, when the community is designed.
It is not a group home
Group homes ("case famiglia") are socio-assistance solutions for people in particularly fragile conditions (minors, people with disabilities, non-self-sufficient elderly). They are governed by specific norms and have a care purpose.
CoLiving is a housing service for autonomous adults who choose to live alongside a community and a layer of included services.
It's not care: it's housing.
Mixing the two — as sometimes happens in public debate — is unfair to both. The group home deserves its own rules. CoLiving deserves its own.
It is not a long-stay B&B
A B&B is a tourism-related accommodation activity, regulated as such, designed for short, touristic stays.
CoLiving is residential, not touristic, and is regulated (or should be) as such. In many Italian contexts the distinction is still blurred, and some operators use the tourism regime to cover long-term housing, ending up in regulatory grey zones.
For the CoLiving sector to grow in a healthy way, this distinction has to be kept clean.
What CoLiving is, in three lines
A housing model that combines private space, designed common spaces, included services, and active management.
A third option, after the independent house and the condominium apartment.
A life choice for adults who want neither solitude nor a traditional family — but a curated community next to their privacy.
Everything else is operational detail. The basic vocabulary is this.
Why we need this kind of literacy
When a new product or service category enters a market, it always goes through a phase of confusion. The mobile phone was "a phone you carry around." The laptop was "a smaller computer." The electric car is "a car that runs on electricity instead." All these descriptions were useful for a while and then were superseded, because none captured the new essence of the new thing.
The same thing is happening to CoLiving. For a few more years we'll have to say "it's a kind of…". But the sooner we call it by its name, the sooner the sector can mature.
And maturing the sector means adequate regulation, trained professionals, accessible financing, controlled costs, guaranteed quality, happier people.
To get there, we first need to stop confusing it with the shared kitchen.
Closing
I run CoLivingOne in Rimini as the operational lab where these distinctions get tested with real residents, real maintenance, and real evenings. COOliving is the cooperative track that brings the model to lower income brackets. CoLivIt is the national operators' network whose first job is exactly this kind of vocabulary work.
If you're describing CoLiving to someone — or being described to as a "CoLiving operator" by someone who doesn't quite know what that means — I hope this helps.
If you want to talk about the model itself, the previous post goes deeper.
Suggested internal links
/projects/vision/contact/blog/why-coliving-can-become-the-third-form-of-living/blog/home-is-more-than-a-roof
Suggested CTA
If you operate or invest in housing and want to talk about what makes CoLiving different from the categories it gets confused with — write to me.