Case Study: merlins place

A NYC apartment turned 3rd space

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Jul 30, 2024

This is a reader-submitted case study from Zu Shi with some contributions from Ulysses Chuang, part of an ongoing series of deep dives on community living spaces. To see others, visit the Supernuclear directory.

If you want to contribute a case study of your community, please let us know at hi@gosupernuclear.com.

Date founded: May 1st, 2023
Location: New York City
Rented or owned: Rented
Amount of space: 4 Bedrooms, 2 Bathrooms, and two large open common areas
Governance: Vibes (we don’t have a formal governance structure established)

Merlins place is a two story loft apartment in Brooklyn. It’s in the same apartment complex as the Fractal coliving community, and for the past year, it's been a 3rd-space for residents of Fractal as well as for other people in our broader circle of communities. It's been beyond rewarding building and maintaining this space, and we hope to inspire more people to transform their own homes into 3rd-spaces.

Origins

In the spring of 2023, the three founding members of merlins place independently learned about the Fractal NYC coliving community through mutual friends. We met at a social gathering and were all looking to put some roots down in the community. We really enjoyed spending time around like-minded people here, and were ready to sign a lease on an apartment.

Fractal was outgrowing its existing common space in a different apartment at the time. The three of us noticed that we were all really interested in building community, so we sat down to brainstorm with some others. It so happened that a large, two-floor apartment came on the market in the apartment complex around the same time. We started dreaming about the sort of community space we could turn it into if we leased it.

When it opened in May, we were nervous about whether people would actually use the space, but merlins place has become the de facto gathering + event space for everyone in our extended circles at Fractal, and it hardly sees any downtime these days :)

Today, walk into one of our living rooms at any given moment and you might find people writing poetry, singing at the piano, choreographing light shows, and preparing lesson plans for the next course they're teaching.

Our apartment hosts 5-15 events a week and has become the hub for the ~40 people living at Fractal, and even served as the first classroom for a grassroots school called FractalU (substack) which had more than 200 students enrolled in 25 classes over the past year, and many of those classes were taught right here in our common space.

Inner Workings

Merlins place is light on rules! We see ourselves as residents who are in charge of maintaining our space and sharing it with our friends. The events calendar is open to everyone who becomes acquainted with the community through mutual friends and events. If someone in the community wants to host something, all they have to do is book a slot.

The apartment has two floors, and we furnished them in a modular fashion so that we could host a variety of events and reconfigure the space as needed.

The upstairs has living room vibes and hosts parties, book clubs, hackathons, and musical jams. Downstairs we have a cozy “rave cave” with foam floor tiles and LED lights where we have ecstatic dances, movie nights, community classes, and impromptu tai chi sessions.

Hours

When there isn’t an event taking place, the space is often open to friends who come to co-work, hang out, cook+eat meals at the communal table, make art, and have conversations.

Event Hosting

What we've found is that events have a domino effect - event attendees will often come to us with inspiration for new events, which attracts even more visitors to the space. At this point 80%-90% of events in the space are hosted by people who live outside the apartment - and they’re often collaborations between people who met here!

Cleanliness

Keeping the space clean and tidy is a lot of work, but we emphasize individual responsibility via Leave No Trace norms. Visitors are expected to understand the expectation that they should leave the space at least as clean as they found it. Beyond that, the residents of the space split up the regular cleaning tasks. We see it as a form of patronage - keeping the space consistently well maintained so that people feel at ease here.

Finances

In terms of finances, while residents cover the basic costs of rent and utilities, we operate on a cooperative model that encourages regular visitors to contribute. We've implemented a transparent financial ledger where all expenses and donations are recorded and accessible to community members using an open source plain text accounting tool called Beancount, along with a web UI to visualize the accounts called Fava. This open-book approach not only fosters trust but also highlights the collective effort required to maintain and enhance our shared space. By making our financial needs visible, we empower our community to actively participate in the space's sustainability.

Tips and Takeaways

Turning your home into a 3rd-space: low risk, high reward

Think about it: you're already paying for your living space. Many of us have rooms that sit empty for hours or even days at a time. Why not make the most of what you're already paying for? By opening up your home as a community space, you're not incurring additional costs—you're simply using your space more efficiently. We realized this and decided to intentionally choose a slightly larger apartment. This approach minimizes financial risks; after all, the worst-case scenario was ending up with a spacious apartment for the three of us to share. But the potential upsides are unbounded.

The benefits to residents who host a community space in their home can be profound. It suddenly becomes easier to build close friendships and build a robust support network. The constant flow of diverse people and ideas through one's living space serves as a source of inspiration and creativity, and an antidote to loneliness and isolation.

Outside of what merlins place has meant to us, here’s a sampling of the other wins we’ve seen here within the first year of running the space

Proving ground for FractalU - 12 different classes of 3-12 sessions each taught by friends and friends of friends here
5 (by my count) romantic relationships formed from people who met here
3 new group houses formed in South Brooklyn
250+ total events hosted (!!)
1,000+ unique visitors to our space (!!!)

Find roommates interested in communities

One thing that helped kickstart merlins place was that all of the initial residents were really interested in community-building. All three either really liked hosting dinners or meetups with friends, and having these initial events inspired a flywheel of followup gatherings that really made merlins place feel like a home for our community of friends.

Note that this doesn’t mean that everyone living in the space has to be an extrovert! The initial & current roommates were not all extroverts, and neither are many of the event hosts. The people who get the most out of merlins place are typically those seeking community and willing to take initiative. Those who make a leap of faith often find that close connections form in proportion to their efforts.

Calendar Transparency

It's helpful to be very clear about when the space is open to friends or not! We maintain a calendar that we share with friends of the space. It keeps track of events, and the negative space helps people understand when it’s safe to swing by just to hang out or co-work. Below is an example of what that looks like on a given week. Sometimes, we do manually specify blocks as coworking oriented, in case someone is inviting people specifically for that purpose and wants to prevent the time from being allocated for a different event.

Many visitors love pets, but they do pose an additional challenge

We’d be remiss not to mention the fact that merlins place is named after one of the cats that lives here with us.

Visitors to the space often love seeing and interacting with the cats. Cat cafes exist for a reason, after all. That said, we do make sure to keep some allergy pills on hand in the bathroom for those who might be affected by our furry friends. There’s also some extra care required when pets are in the space. Visitors need to be careful about things like leaving food unattended, propping doors open, etc.

Pets can play a big role in making a community space feel more homey, and while they do require careful consideration, don’t think that having pets precludes you from turning your own space into a 3rd space! Many pets are more adaptive than you might think. In our case, while the cats were at first confused about the number of visitors, they are now quite hospitable even around strangers :)

Versatile equipment and reconfigurable furniture

On the lower floor of our space, we have a projector + screen which enables everything from movie screenings, to presentations and classes, and other types of hybrid gatherings. Certain pieces of equipment like this can add a lot of value to a community space. The initial cost can seem large for something like a projector, but it easily pays out far more in value over time if you’re hosting a variety of events in the space.

We also lined our lower floor with foam dance/exercise mats which have inspired bodywork classes, dance sessions, and cozy floor-sitting hangouts. This was a cheap way to turn our hard stone floor into something that was more comfy.

Community projects

One of the coolest projects that has spun out of merlins place is this awesome 16x16' lighting installation on our ceiling, dreamed up by one of our residents. We've got 3,000 LEDs up there that we can program to do pretty much anything. It's turned into this playground for all sorts of wild ideas. Anyone can hop on their phone or laptop and control the lights through this website we put together where you can upload custom animation routines that leverage p5.js code. We love seeing people create their own sequences and share them for others to play with or tweak. It's even sparked some really chill sound bath parties where folks mix music with light animations for a full-on sensory experience. It's been amazing to see how this fun little project has brought so many different people together, sparking friendships and collaborations we never expected. This kind of community-driven creativity is what makes merlins place feel less like a house and more like a big, quirky family.

3rd spaces and coliving are symbiotic

In general our 3rd space has been a great way to increase interest in co-living at Fractal! Since our 3rd space sometimes feels like two additional living rooms for the other apartments in the building, our apartment has made renting here very attractive to those interested in living in and around Fractal.

There is a very symbiotic relationship between our 3rd space and the broader coliving community here that it’s a part of - as more events happen at merlins place, more people learn about and become interested in Fractal. On the other hand, as more people move to Fractal, we get more interesting and unique guests and events as well.

Grassroots community classes are great too!

Above we mentioned that 3rd spaces + coliving is great. I suspect that if we add grassroots community classes like FractalU on top of this, we have a really killer combo.

FractalU has been the engine that continuously brings passionate people, topic groups, and unique events (e.g.poetry readings, cooking classes, singing showcases) to our place. I think there’s a whole article to be written about how the combination 3rd space, coliving, and community classes might impact each other, but suffice to say that community classes are a very legitimate way to catalyze an ongoing social scene.

Final Words & Contacts

In our opinion, starting a 3rd space is a low-risk and underrated way to create communities. For us running merlins place, it has been extremely rewarding to meet all kinds of awesome people coming through our space, and if you could not tell from our Friendsgiving pic below, this has vastly increased our sense of belonging in NYC 😊

P.S.: Some of our residents are working on launching a new platform that will empower people to open up their living spaces (whether in a group house or just your own home) to their broader community of friends for coworking, events, etc. It’s not yet launched, but if you’d like to stay in the loop, sign up for our mailing list at homework.rocks.

And if you or someone you know are interested in living with us (long or short term), starting a 3rd space, or just have questions, feel free to introduce yourself and get in touch - we'd love to see more 3rd spaces hosted out of living rooms in the future!

General inquiries: hi@merlins.place

IG: instagram.com/merlinsplacesocial/

Twitter: x.com/merlinsplacesoc/

Learn more & get involved with Fractal University: https://fractalnyc.com/university

Hope to see you here sometime! :)

Thanks Zu for this post, and for all you and the other residents of merlins place do for the community in NYC!

Supernuclear