Lives at home #1: Behind closed doors

article

DATE

21 Sep 2026

AUTHOR

Zara Ferreira

Lives at home #1: Behind closed doors

AUTHOR

Zara Ferreira

“What Woolf called for – which I have always viewed as the possibility of my own home – has, for many, become exactly that: a closed-door room in a shared flat. As long as there’s enough money left over for a mini-fridge, a key and some noise-cancelling headphones, obviously.”

“(…) And on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper (…).”

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929

The word house had modest beginnings. It does not originate from the word domus, referring to the residence and the household, where dominus was the dom of his domain, restricted to those entitled to have Dom written on their card. Dies dominicus meant the most important day of all, the day on which some individuals did not work. House was synonymous with hut or shack, a basic shelter. In contrast to the sturdy masonry of the domus were the vulnerable wood of the hut or the woven straw of the shack. Some dictionaries further state that a shack is a one-door dwelling – which supports my argument quite well. In the Portuguese language, the word casa (house) has, with time, also given rise to casar (to marry). It comes with the folk saying Quem casa, quer casa (Whoever get married wants a home). The language has kept the idea that uniting two people means establishing a household: love and a hut. And, regardless of all the social transformations, the married or unmarried couple continues to be the default economic unit of the traditional housing market: a house is expected to be affordable on, at the very least, two wages. The market has developed another unit of measurement for those without a second income: the room. When there are any, the adverts call it a ‘shared home’. However, in practice, the only thing shared is the cost of the communal facilities: the kitchen, the bathroom, electricity, water, gas and the internet.

Many people do not enter this arrangement because they have chosen to live together. Their motivation is that, on their own, they cannot afford an entire house. In early 2026, the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom flat in Lisbon was €1.539 – 167% of the minimum wage (€920) and 115% of the national average basic wage (€1.342), even before tax and social security deductions. Ownership does not solve the issue. A €200.000 property – which, in most of the (few) existing cases, would be close to uninhabitable – requires a person over the age of 35 to earn almost €2.000 a month. Those who want – or have to – keep living in the capital will find that renting a room remains – for now – a luxury that some ordinary people can still afford: €550 is the median asking price.

Community living is an age-old tradition. Whatever the reasons, whether economic, cultural, religious or ideological, they are almost always intertwined. There are co-living systems – that much-loved Anglicism to describe very different ways of living – in which the architecture was imagined, designed or adapted to accommodate specific forms of communal living, based on the ties, rules and intentions – or impositions – that sustained them. The longhouses of the Haudenosaunee to the phalanstery of Fourier’s imagination; the siheyuan of northern China to West African compound houses; the Jewish kibbutzim and Soviet kommunalki to monasteries and convents… These are structures built on specific social economies and on relationships of belonging, responsibility and power – many of them heavily hierarchical.

Yet, this so-called Century of the Self has led to the consolidation, at least in the West, of the idea that we are each the centre of our own world. At least I – certainly privileged and overly egocentric – grew up with the romantic ideal of meritocracy: if I did well in my studies and at work, I was going to be the captain of my own ship without owing anyone anything – in day-to-day life –, whilst still contributing heroically to the common good.

Lol.

In some places closest to the one I want to talk about – contemporary Portugal – this aspiration for autonomy has not discouraged the deliberate construction of collective residential models. We have the Swedish kollektivhus, the Danish bofællesskaber and the Swiss clusterwohnungen: three models that marry privacy with shared spaces, services and responsibilities. Even if we were to presume that these initiatives are significant in their numbers and accessibility within their respective environments, in Portugal, the concept of sharing domestic space outside the family sphere is far from being a widely accepted practice. There remains the notion that adult life only begins when we have a home of our own, and heaven help the neighbour who even dares to glimpse our window. But this tendency is not simply a cultural eccentricity: multiple studies indicate that the value placed on private property is a direct result of countries where there is little public intervention in the housing sector. Home ownership serves as a sort of private social security: assets, old-age protection, intergenerational transfer, and a buffer against this already long-standing instability.

This whole lengthy and convoluted discussion is leading up to this: most of the shared living in Portugal – whether with parents, with the person we divorced five years ago, with strangers, or even with that reallycool landlord we live with, whilst conveniently ignoring the underlying relationship of dependency – occurs not because of a choice to live together, but because of the financial barriers to independent housing. This happens in spaces intended for other ways of living, particularly family-oriented flats. The community does not shape the house; instead, the cost of the house encourages a community to arise through sheer necessity.

We even enter this new home in good faith – were it not for the fact that we are all already conditioned to turn every response into a new adventure, forever working to build up our ever-evolving CVs. The word flexibility is to precariousness as a collaborator is to a worker. Right, let’s go right in. I leave it up to you to imagine whether this is a twelve-room flat (yes, there are several in Lisbon), or a five-room one. There are sometimes rules, such as not being permitted to bring anyone there; other times, just a general idea of ‘common sense’. We quickly understand that everyone has very different standards when it comes to cleaning, communication and organising daily life. Some folks never clean the kitchen after using it. We start shopping for ready meals at the supermarket so we can skip having to clean the whole kitchen before we can even think about frying a steak. We never have time for that. We start stashing food in our bedroom because of that one time someone ate what was on our fridge shelf. To do this, we start living on food that does not go off. Then some use the bathroom outside the agreed times. We start waking up earlier so we can shower before everyone else and avoid getting fired for always turning up late. Before the living room was converted into a bedroom, some mornings we would find strangers on the sofa. There were parties held in that room to which we had not been invited. We no longer felt safe. We began to live only inside the bedroom, shut away behind closed doors, and feeling increasingly tired. We strive to work harder so that one day we may live in a home of our own, but our bodies no longer have the strength to fulfil that wish. Over the years, and in the subsequent houses, neither you nor the others even try to leave your bedrooms.

As long as the energy remains to turn necessity into a hope-filled narrative, calling this form of living ‘community’ is tempting. However, at the age of 40, the days when you lived in a room because your studies had taken you to another city are long gone. The market feeds the fantasy: precarious conditions acquire a fancy English designation, with photographs of a shared table and the promise of new friendships. People who never chose one another can form a community. But it presupposes more than multiple rents at the same address: participation in common rules of living, mutual responsibilities and the real option to stay or leave. If not, the word serves only to gloss over scarcity. The old-timers will say this is nothing new. They are, in part, correct. The working classes have always lived together, sharing houses, rooms and even beds. Their accommodation used to be smaller and unsanitary; nowadays, they even have running water, mind you! Throughout much of the twentieth century, however, providing people with access to decent housing was seen as a social achievement. These days, the market pitches the opposite trend as a contemporary lifestyle.

The ‘temporary situation’ keeps dragging on. People find themselves repeatedly packing their bags. We learn to live without any possessions that would hinder the next move. Books go digital, our memories become material-free, and the heirlooms inherited from our grandparents remain locked away in a chest that still fits in our parents’ house. We may call it detachment, minimalism or eco-consciousness, but sometimes it is nothing more than a life story that no longer fits into the next room. Those who rent a room have seen their home revert to something akin to a one-door hut. What Woolf called for – which I have always viewed as the possibility of a person’s own home – has, for many, become exactly that: a closed-door room in a shared flat. As long as there’s enough money left over for a mini-fridge, a key and some noise-cancelling headphones, obviously.

The problem is not that we live together, but that we are compelled to do so without the space, the relationships and the systems needed for that communal life having been thought through. A community deserving of the name requires doors – the ability to open them to others, to close them safely, and to walk through them when communal life comes to an end. As Woolf wrote, if a door lock stands for the power to think for oneself, how many pages are left blank because so many people can no longer close a door that is truly their own?