$850 /Month

More than a place to hang your hat: a room in a warm, colourful home where one night of cooking buys you a week of shared dinners, the gardens feed the table, and the people around it recognize what you care about.It might quietly turn out to be the best thing you do for yourself this year. You don't have to take my word for it — the rest of this ad is built for checking.THE OFFER, PLAINLYEverything below is the whole deal. There is no other paperwork with a surprise in it.WHAT YOU PAY• $850/month — utilities, wifi, and household supplies all included ($27 of it goes to the house's common money, the shared pot for supplies). No hydro bill, no internet bill, no "whose turn is it to buy dish soap."• $400 damage deposit, refunded when you leave the room clean and undamaged.• $400 one-time setup fee — returned to you in full if you stay a year or more.• To move in, that's $1,650 and nothing else. (A $400 pet deposit applies if you bring one, making it $2,050.)WHAT YOU GET• One room in a renovated 7-bedroom intentional home in NW Calgary, near Confederation Park — bus stop out front, ~15 min to downtown. This one is on the main floor, in the middle of the home's life. It's a small room — a bedroom, not an apartment: bed, desk, closet, hardwood floor, and the afternoon sun coming in the window. The rest of the house is where you'd actually live; if you need a room big enough to live inside, this isn't it. The shared bathroom is right beside it — kept clean, in good shape, heated floor — and the kitchen and the long table are a few steps down the hall. The walls were freshly painted this month, a soft sage green.• Dinner you didn't cook, most nights of the rotation. You cook one evening; the rest of the week you sit down to a meal someone made for you.• The whole house, not just the room: electric sauna, food gardens front and back, fireplace room + den, well-equipped kitchen (induction stove, Vitamix, Berkey filter), a desk in the shared office so your bedroom stays a bedroom, indoor bike parking, solar panels, composting, rain catchment — and the building out back, which gets its own section below.• Somewhere to host the people you love — overnight guests get their own space in the back building, up to ten days a visit. Not your floor.• Available now.WHAT YOU GIVE• One evening of cooking in the rotation.• 70 minutes of chores a week — on a schedule, on a whiteboard. Visible, finite, fair.• Two one-hour house meetings a month. That is the entire formal load.THE TERM, PLAINLY• A rolling agreement with no end date — it simply continues until one of us gives notice. To leave, you pay the month you give notice in, plus the two following months. So budget roughly three months of runway in either direction. In plain numbers: give notice on September 4 and you're responsible for September, October and November; December 1 you're free. We'd rather you read that here than discover it in a document later.THE SHAPE OF A WEEK HEREBeyond the cooking night, the chores and the two meetings, the rest is yours: the sauna after work, backyard fires, board games, the occasional skill-share, music night, or celebration. More fire circle than party house — our rhythm is a mostly-sober one.THE BUILDING OUT BACKOff the lane there's a second building — a detached double garage we stopped parking in and turned into two rooms.One is a second living room. It's where you go when the house is full and you want company that isn't at the kitchen table, or when you want to be out of the house without leaving home. It has changed what this place feels like more than any renovation we've done inside.The other is the maker area: a workbench and a real set of tools. Strong on tools; honest about space — a project can stay out overnight, but it's a shared room in daily use, not a bay where a build sits spread across the floor for a week.Honest about it: it's electrically heated, so keeping it warm through a Calgary January costs real money and we use it lightly in deep winter. Three seasons out of four it's the best room we have. We'd rather say that now than have you discover it in February.And because it's a separate building, the house keeps ordinary hours while somebody else keeps their own. Skinny is often out there at two in the morning and it is a non-issue — which tells you something true about this home: there is room here for your actual hours, not just the household's.It also does something a rented room almost never does: it gives you somewhere to put the people you love. A sister in from out of province, a friend passing through — they get their own space out back for a few days, not your bedroom floor and not a couch in somebody else's living room. Up to ten days for a visit. The limit is simple and it's the same for all of us: you host, which means you're the one who welcomes them and stays responsible for how the visit goes. You're not just renting a bedroom — you're getting a home you can invite people into.IS THIS YOU?Maybe you've visited an ecovillage and felt something in you say "this." Maybe you've done a season of WWOOFing, or taken your permaculture course — and the certificate sits in a drawer while your Tuesday nights look the same. Maybe you've studied Nonviolent Communication, or you're teaching yourself herbalism, or your shelf holds Braiding Sweetgrass, Charles Eisenstein, Ivan Illich. And Calgary can be a lonely city to hold those interests in. You've maybe asked, more than once: where are my people?Or maybe none of those words are yours — you just want to live somewhere warm and honest, where dinner is shared and people say what they mean. That counts too.WHAT BECOMES POSSIBLEHere's what we know is possible, because we live inside it: a home where what you care about isn't a quirk to explain — it's a common tongue. Where your questions and projects get met, harvested, cross-pollinated over dinner. From a base camp like that, people build real paths: maybe yours leads to a permaculture farm. Maybe to founding your own intentional community. Maybe to a regenerative, mutual-aid way of living right here in Calgary. Maybe it's quieter — deepening your compassion, your practice, your understanding of the world as it is. The home doesn't choose your path. It feeds it.If we're your people, I can promise you this: you'll find a place here — recognized, and recognizing. Whether we are your people, only you can check. Everything in this ad — above and below — is for checking.WHO'S BEHIND THISI'm Louis-Alexandre. I've spent about a decade building this home for real — stayed at intentional communities across North America (Twin Oaks, Earthaven, Ganas, OUR Ecovillage) long enough to see how the good ones work, and taught sociocratic governance for years alongside Diana Leafe Christian, one of the most respected voices in this world. And it isn't just me — three friends have been building it with me: David, an entrepreneur, ten-plus years in; Jordan, a software engineer, about five; and Skinny, a circus artist with a real gift for bringing people together, about three. We're not claiming it's perfect. We're telling you it's real, and the people holding it have done this before.WHO HOLDS WHATWorth knowing before you walk in, because it is knowable:• Three of us hold equity in the building — me, David and Jordan — each under our own agreement, and each with an equal voice on the terms the building is made available under, regardless of who put in how much.• Running the home day to day is a different job from owning part of it. That job is one person's — mine — carried under written agreements rather than by committee.• Other pieces are held by people who live here. Skinny carries events and the chore system; other roles are held around the house, and they're real roles with real say inside them, not chores with a title.• We keep those two things — what you own and what you carry — deliberately apart. You do not need to buy in to hold something here that matters.HOW DECISIONS WORK, HONESTLYThe home runs on written agreements. Sociocracy-inspired: clear roles, real say that grows with trust — and final calls sit with the home's stewards. This is not a flat commune, and you don't arrive with an equal vote on day one. We'd rather tell you that at the door than have you discover it at the table.WHO THIS IS NOT FOR — said with warmth• If you want cheap, convenient housing where nothing is asked of you, we'll be a bad and exhausting deal — please rent somewhere easier, with our blessing.• If you love the language of community but the dishes are always someone else's problem — we'd rather be honest now than resentful later.• If your relationship with alcohol runs past a glass with dinner toward regular heavy nights, our mostly-sober rhythm will chafe.• If an equal vote from day one is a dealbreaker, believe yourself — this won't feel right.HOW JOINING WORKSIt starts small: write to us. If it reads like a fit, we'll set up a quick hello call, then have you over for dinner — as our guest. If we both feel it, you stay ten days, free of charge, and live the actual life: the meals, the chores, the sauna, the whiteboard. Then we each take two days to think, and we both answer plainly — yes, no, or not now. Both directions, no hard feelings. Nobody signs anything until both sides have lived it. After that, the rolling agreement described above — two-month terms that simply renew until one of us gives notice.One more honest thing: it's one room, and our process isn't fast by design. If something in you leaned forward while reading, write now rather than someday.TO REPLYSend a few lines about you, what you're seeking in a home, your move-in timing — and, so we know you read this far: what would you cook for the house on your night?We're not selling you a room. We're looking for our people. If you read this and felt relief that it's not for you — good, that's the ad doing its job. If you felt found: Calgary's not that big. Come find us.