By Patricia Mikkelson, a resident of the Living Springs Log House since 2017

There’s an old idea that is starting to gain new momentum — that we don’t have to live alone behind our own closed doors, disconnected from the people around us. That community doesn’t mean giving up privacy, and privacy doesn’t mean giving up community. That a group of people who share values can live close to one another, with good boundaries and good systems in place, sharing meals some nights and solitude every night — raising gardens and animals and projects together without anyone giving up healthy boundaries.

I hope that reading this article, and eventually walking the property, you start to see that it was built for this kind of shared life.

A House That Already Wants to Divide Itself

Look closely and the bones are already there.

A primary bedroom suite with its own potential private entrance. The primary bedroom is positioned in a way that would allow it to open to its own private entrance — meaning one household, or one member of the community, could come and go without walking through anyone else’s living space. With some work, one of the two windows connecting to the deck could be turned into a door. That’s one of the harder things to add to most homes after the fact, and here it’s a matter of finishing what the layout already suggests.

A garage ready to become more rooms for the house. With insulation and a bit of finish work, the garage could become one or two bedrooms, a playroom, or a recording studio. People pass through the garage to reach the grow room and the stairs up to the house, so these rooms would stay part of the house. A bedroom here could suit a community elder, or anyone who wants to be close to the heart of things while still having a room of their own.

A basement dwelling with its own entrance that’s already being lived in comfortably. It is the most finished private dwelling on the whole property, with its own entrance opening onto the gardens and a concrete patio. Inside, there’s a spacious, sunny room that already works as a combined dining room, living room, and kitchenette, with hookups in place for a full kitchen. There’s a plumbing fixture set up for a sink in the large room, or the bathroom sink could be made into a bigger sink, and the full bathroom is already there. And with community living, the shared kitchen upstairs can be used to make shared and personal meals. Outside, it’s semi-private rather than fully private: the walking path runs right in front, so you can say hi to your neighbors as they go by. It always reminds me of the only poem I’ve ever memorized:

Let me live in a house by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by—
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner’s seat,
Nor hurl the cynic’s ban—
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

Sam Walter Foss, “The House by the Side of the Road” (1897)

Two additional rooms — connected by a walk-in closet — are windowless, though one has the potential for a window to be added, bringing in natural light and making it an official bedroom. The other room, with three walls surrounded by concrete and dirt, makes a good storage room that doesn’t get too hot or too cold.

This basement dwelling is ready for a couple or a single community member to move into right away. (Why do I call it the basement suite and not an apartment? A home without a full kitchen is called a suite. This one is ready to be wired up for a kitchen, so it could become an apartment.)

The main house: shared space and roomy bedrooms. The log house sits above the basement dwelling and has two stories. The main floor, with the living room, kitchen, laundry room and pantry, is made to be common space for everyone, and even the smaller downstairs bedroom could become shared space. Upstairs, the two extra-large bedrooms each have space for two beds and two huge walk-in closets, with their own bathroom, so more than one person can live in each room.

A Second Bedroom That Wants to Be Something Else Entirely

Just off the mudroom and laundry room sits the smaller downstairs bedroom. It has a tiny closet and, therefore, not much storage. The funny thing about the ground floor is that the only bathrooms are in the two downstairs bedrooms — so it makes sense that this bathroom becomes the one people use when they’re gathered on the main floor, so no one has to run upstairs.

Reimagined, this room becomes a shared co-working space — room enough for around eight small desks, a place where community members can work, study, and run cooperative or individual businesses side by side. It’s a natural extension of the common space, close to the kitchen, laundry room, pantry and dining room. Two doors, one from the garage and one from the back of the house, make it easy to reach. The stairs up from the garage are fairly short. A ramp could be built there, although it would be difficult, and the back of the house, where a car can drive right up, is an easier place to build one. The closet could have shelves where workers put their personal possessions that they want to leave in the co-working office space. The pantry could be used partially for that purpose as well.

Because this handy dandy room already has a bathroom with a toilet and shower attached, it solves the one real puzzle of shared community living here. Everyone on the main floor now has a bathroom they can reach without climbing stairs, tucked right off the space where they’re already working and gathering, and the upstairs bedrooms keep their own bathroom. If someone is a guest, or is camping on the land, they have easy access to a shower as well.

It’s a nice surprise when the “problem room” turns out to be the smartest room in the house!

Added to the kitchen, pantry, laundry room, and living room, this floor becomes the heart of the home — the place everyone passes through, cooks in, works in, and gathers in, while each person or household still has a private suite to retreat to at the end of the day.

The Deck That’s Already Waiting

Step into the living room and there’s a door that opens onto nothing but its own quiet potential — clearly placed with a deck in mind, in the cool, shady back of the house. A steep hill filled with forest acts like natural air conditioning, and the back of the house stays relatively cool even in the hottest summers. The concrete slab also contributes to coolness as it is never exposed to sun. 

Build a deck, screen it in, and you have a three-season room made for early coffee, evening conversation, and community gathering, bugs kept out and breeze kept in. It’s the kind of space where people actually gather, without anyone needing to host anything.

A shade garden full of medicinal plants and other shade-loving species could grow here too, but it would need a retaining wall first. The hillside needs one anyway, since there’s some erosion back there, and the wall could hold a very beautiful shade garden.

And if a deck isn’t the direction — that same stretch of level, open land behind the house, with electricity close by, is enough to comfortably fit a motorhome. For a community member or prospective member testing the waters before committing to a full build-out, that’s an elegant in-between: someone can be present, part of daily life, before a single wall goes up.

Tucked into the lower part of the house next to the garage is a room built to keep people safe in a storm — thick walls, solid and secure. But for the coldest parts of the year, it becomes something else entirely: a winter growing space. We hung grow lights and filled it with kale, longevity spinach, mint, and young moringa trees reaching for the light. 

On a gray January day, there’s nothing quite like stepping into that room and finding yourself surrounded by green, growing things. It’s a shelter in more ways than one. A faucet makes water easily accessible, and 5-gallon jugs of stored water help ensure extra supply in case of emergency. Food stored in the nearby storage room along with emergency equipment in the garage makes this a good place to hunker down.

But if you are worried about tornadoes, the main natural disasters that happen in Arkansas, they rarely touch down in the hilly areas that we are part of. 

The Metal Building: Room for the Community to Grow

The 40’x60′ metal building is where this vision gets really exciting.

There is enough height and framework here that a second story could eventually be added — creating room for studio apartments, additional bedrooms, or full living units. Alternatively, the whole metal building could be reimagined as one spacious home for a household with many members.

The log house already has a big kitchen and common rooms made for sharing, so the metal building doesn’t need to replace them. It gives options, depending on who comes. If one multigenerational family takes over the whole house, the metal building is the place to add room for more people: a second home, small apartments, or bedrooms around a shared space below. It already has running water, a bathroom ready for a shower, 240-volt power and its own septic system. (The water runs through a gravity-fed hose from the cistern. The pump doesn’t work, so a new owner would want to repair or replace it.)

If the community grows beyond what the house can hold, the metal building could also become extra shared space:

• A gathering hall for celebrations, neighborhood potlucks, meetings and even paid events
• A makerspace or workshop for shared tools and projects
• Space for small businesses: mushroom growing, a fermentation kitchen (kraut, kimchi, kombucha, vinegar) or a studio
• A second kitchen for big gatherings, alongside the main kitchen in the house

Either way, the log house stays the heart of the home, and the metal building gives the community room to grow.

There’s a whole body of wisdom about designing community this way. Books like A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander and his colleagues, Creating Cohousing by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett, and Creating a Life Together by Diana Leafe Christian talk about giving people a gentle mix of public, semi-private and private space: places to gather, places to greet each other in passing, and places to close the door. This property already has all three.

Room to Build, Not Just Room to Live

Here’s a detail that changes the whole scope of what’s possible: with 14.75 acres, there may be room for up to three homes at about four acres each, each with its own septic system, and there’s already a clearable, fairly flat site near the log house. That’s something to confirm with the county before making plans.

Room to Grow

Beyond the buildings, the land itself is generous. There’s enough acreage for each household to tend its own garden plot, plus an already-existing fenced in garden where everyone contributes and everyone benefits. With clear boundaries and agreements in place, a shared garden is a real gift, and it brings a community together in a beautiful way.

And Then, the Pond

Here’s the dream inside the dream: there’s an old pond site that could be dug out again. Over the years, the pond site has filled in with cattails and other wetland growth, so this isn’t a quick cleanup — it would need to be fully dug out and reclaimed. There are several possible ways water might be brought to it, but that would need to be figured out.

Once excavated, reshaped, and given a dependable water source, it could become a natural swimming pool — a living system of moving water, filtered by plants and gravel instead of chemicals.

The Land Itself

None of this works without the land carrying it — and this land does. A cave spring that has filled the cisterns consistently since 2017, straight through drought. Established organic gardens and hugelkultur beds already producing, already chemical-free. Quiet, privacy, and a lake view that makes you forget there’s a world beyond the tree line.

This isn’t a property that needs to be convinced to hold an intentional community. It already knows how.

The Living Springs Log House sits on 14.75 acres near Huntsville, Arkansas — a place built, quietly and almost accidentally, for the kind of shared life so many of us are hungry for: real privacy, real community, and real land to grow into together. If this sounds like the home your community has been picturing, not just for one household but for many, please reach out.

How this article came to be: This article was written by Patricia Mikkelson, who has lived at the Living Springs Log House since 2017, together with Claude.ai, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. Patricia brought her many years of interest in intentional community, her knowledge of every room and corner of the house, and her ideas for how it could be shared. Claude helped organize and write the article. Patricia is a friend of Barbara Hulley, the owner of the Living Springs Log House.

A few insights:

• Community living doesn’t require identical spaces. It takes a mix of private places (the basement suite, the bedrooms) and shared ones (the main floor of the log house), and this property already has both.
• The log house is the heart of it all: its big kitchen and common rooms are already made for sharing. The metal building is where the community can grow, whether that means a home for more people or more shared space.
• With 14.75 acres, the community doesn’t have to stop at what already exists. There’s room to grow into a small neighborhood over time.