Presenting: coliving-europe.com

Five separate sites, five front doors, no hallway. This is the hallway.

The regional guides came first — the Algarve, the Costa Blanca, Italy, the Balkans, the Baltic — each written for someone who has already picked a coast. Almost nobody has. They know they want longer than a fortnight and shorter than a lease, and that’s the entire plan.

So I built the hallway. A grand word for a page with five links and a map on it.

The longest part was deciding what not to build. No booking engine, no availability calendar, no filters with sliders. You pick a coastline and follow the link, and somebody else’s payment form ruins your afternoon instead of mine.

A house gets in on three conditions:

• Somewhere to actually work. A desk, and a chair designed by someone who has sat in a chair.
• A private room, everything else shared. The room is for closing the door at the end of a bad Tuesday.
• Months, not nights. Priced per night, it’s a hotel wearing a nicer word.

Most of them I’ve lived in. That’s a selection method with obvious limits — I can only be in one place at a time, and I have opinions about pillows — but it beats reading a listing and hoping.

The hub was a week of work. The five regions written properly underneath are years, and four of them are still being filled in while the hub sits there looking finished.