Willow and Hearth

“My husband and I are raising our daughter on a family compound right next door to both my parents and my siblings.” That is how Taylor Bunting, who posts as @taybunting_, opens a one minute video. The picture is a mowed lawn, a black metal fence and a line of tall trees, and what carries the video is the list she reads out.

Her caption calls it “living next to my built in best friends,” and says it has been her dream “since I was a little kid.” She adds that she and her husband want their daughter to grow up in a family “as tight knit as mine has always been,” with relatives who are each other’s “partner in crime, first call, and best friends.”

The list starts with holidays. They wake up “all together in the same place for every holiday,” she says, especially Christmas morning, which she calls super important to them. She does not have to miss her younger siblings’ firsts, such as coming home from their first day of school. Their golden retriever, Ollie, can walk over to her parents’ house any day of the week to play with their two dogs.

The next items are about daily logistics. She says she does not have to worry about squeezing in a shower or a workout when her husband is out, because a sibling or a parent is around to look after her daughter. Friday and Saturday nights are “practically reserved” for time with family, and they have family dinners pretty much every weekend.

Then come the small practical perks. If you forget something at the grocery store, she says, “there’s a 99% chance that somebody else on the property has something you can borrow.” There are “multiple closets” to take clothes from. A vacation comes with “a built in house sitter and pet sitter.” And delivery drivers are never short on signatures, she says, because someone is almost always home to sign for a package. The narration ends on that line. It does not say how many homes are on the property or who owns what.

For scale, the U.S. Census Bureau counts a multigenerational household as three or more generations under one roof, which is not the same as the separate homes on a compound like this one. By that definition, it counted 6.0 million such households in 2020, up from 5.1 million in 2010, or 4.7 percent of all U.S. households. The Bureau also found the share of family households that were multigenerational ranged from 0.5 percent to 31.0 percent depending on the county, so where you live changes how common the setup is.

If you are weighing something like this, the video tells you what the family gets from it but not how it was built, so the questions fall to you. Before you buy land or add a second home next to relatives, ask your local planning or zoning office whether more than one dwelling is allowed on the lot, and whether each house would sit on its own parcel. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s case study on accessory dwelling units shows how one city handled a second home on a lot: in Minneapolis, each unit required a building permit and inspection, and the owner had to live in one of the units. Other places set different rules, so treat that as an example of what to ask about, not a standard.

It also helps to write down the arrangements the video describes as casual. Taylor Bunting’s list leans on shared dogs, shared closets, borrowed groceries and standing weekend dinners. Those work because everyone agrees to them, so if you plan to live this way, agree on who watches the children and pets, who covers the costs of shared spaces such as the lawn and fence, and what happens if one household wants to leave, before the first move rather than after.