CrowdBuilding started as a side project of Space&Matter, the architecture firm behind Schoonschip, one of Europe's most ambitious floating neighborhoods. Community-led building was already in the studio's DNA. What began as a way to help residents self-build grew into a platform with the ambition to make collective housing the norm, nationwide.
In close collaboration with co-founders Tjeerd Haccou and Brian Garret, Momkai built the strategic brand foundation to help CrowdBuilding scale toward 100,000 collective-build homes by 2035.
Today, the platform counts 12,000 members and 250+ active initiatives across 95+ locations.
Design Starts With Finding the Real Challenge
We're stuck in a housing crisis where even the most basic dreams, a second bedroom, a shared garden, a home near loved ones, have become out of reach. CrowdBuilding exists to shift that reality: by empowering people to build their own homes together with their future neighbours, they offer an alternative to a system built for financial profit.
We interviewed dozens of people about their assumptions, hopes, and doubts around self-building, and found two challenges the brand had to solve. First, the concept itself is still unfamiliar. CrowdBuilding needed to become something like the Funda or Zillow of collective housing, meaning a large part of the brand's job is simply education. Second, a housing dream doesn't become reality overnight. It takes up to five years, and the brand had to stay supportive and guiding for every one of them.
Bolts, Tools and Everyday Crafts
We defined the main thread of CrowdBuilding's story as "Turn your housing dream into housing reality." It does double duty as a promise to future residents, and as a way to compress the entire five-year journey into six words that fit on a homepage, a project page, or the footer of an email.
To make that promise feel achievable rather than abstract, we grounded the visual identity in the vocabulary of everyday DIY: bolts, soil, tools, the same small, familiar objects people already associate with building something themselves. It turns the scale of collective self-building into a project you take on piece by piece, together with the people who'll become your neighbours.
The identity is modular by design, echoing how a CrowdBuilding project actually comes together.
A Strategic Foundation That Holds the Weight
We identified seven milestone moments that mark real progress on the road from a group of strangers to a community, and equipped each one with a toolkit residents could pick up and run with themselves.
We also spoke with project builders, financial stakeholders, and municipalities, the governments who ultimately decide which plots go to which groups, to learn the language each of them actually responds to. The result is a brand that can hold a policy conversation about zoning and a kitchen-table conversation about a shared garden in the same week.
"Momkai managed to quickly grasp the core of our challenges and came up with smart, concrete solutions that really made the difference," says Tjeerd Haccou, co-founder of CrowdBuilding.
The First Step to Setting the Standard
Within a year of the rebrand, the Dutch Cities Utrecht, Zwolle, and the province of Drenthe have since built collective self-build into official housing policy, opening up land specifically through CrowdBuilding. That's helped grow the platform to 12,000 people and 250+ active initiatives, real groups of neighbours working, plot by plot, toward a home. Haccou's ambition remains clear: if 10% of the Netherlands' 100,000 annual new homes were built this way, the housing crisis would look very different.
CrowdBuilding & Momkai
CrowdBuilding empowers citizens to take back control in an overheated housing market, building homes together with their future neighbours instead of leaving supply to developers chasing the highest return. Co-founded by Tjeerd Haccou and Brian Garret, the platform now counts 12,000 members and 250+ active initiatives across the Netherlands.
Momkai stepped in at CrowdBuilding's inflection point: the moment a side project outgrew its parent architecture firm, backed by new funding and a mandate to go national. We built the strategic foundation and identity that carried it through that shift, from investor decks to builder kits to onboarding journeys, turning a bold architectural idea into a platform both municipalities and aspiring homeowners trust.
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