WHEN ANNIE Fischburg turned 14, her 50 family members threw her a "coming of age" party at Puget Ridge Cohousing.

To celebrate Fischburg's interest in East Indian culture, the community put up a large tent, decorated with Indian tapestries and lights, then gathered to share stories and memories of the young woman they'd known for years.

"It meant a lot to me," Fischburg says now, seven years later. "There's just something about sitting down and talking about what it means to become an adult."

In the rush of typical urban life these days, a coming-of-age ceremony with such personal touches seems both special and unusual. What's even more remarkable, though, is that Fischburg's "family" has no blood ties, and, in fact, chose one another as kin. They live, work, play and endure life's most poignant moments together in a neighborhood that is a communal experiment.

Stretching over nearly 2 ½ acres of rolling, wooded residential streets in the Delridge neighborhood of West Seattle, Puget Ridge represents a stark departure from typical urban life. Many of us couldn't even say who lives next door to, much less down the street from, us. Some of us might join our neighbors for the occasional potluck or safety watch, but most also enjoy slipping quietly into the walled privacy of our own homes.

At Puget Ridge, relationships go far beyond polite "good mornings." Women attend the births of each other's babies and swap childcare duties as the kids grow up. Men pitch in with tools and sturdy hands when someone tackles a repair or home-improvement project.

Two years ago, when Janice Kennedy developed breast cancer nine months after moving in, her neighbors signed on to drive her to doctor appointments, help with medical care, run errands and take on odd jobs she was too fatigued to handle. Neighbors Diane Hetrick and Trudi Fajans regularly left oatmeal and fruit at her front door.

Kennedy, who'd recently divorced and moved from her longtime home in the suburbs of Shoreline, couldn't believe they'd help someone they barely knew.

"I was really shocked," Kennedy remembers. "I found family here."

Hetrick, in turn, says caring for Kennedy was a given.

"Sometimes you're giving, and sometimes you're taking," she explains. "It's not about obligation. It's the spirit of Puget Ridge."

FOR THE people who've chosen to live at Puget Ridge, cohousing provides a community unlike anything they'd experience in traditional city or suburban neighborhoods. Houses are clustered around common spaces that encourage interaction with neighbors. Typically, cars are kept underground or at the periphery so people can stroll, mingle and play on the central courtyards, paths or lawns. At a common house, residents come together to make decisions through consensus.

While the close-knit group dynamics represent a utopia for some, others say they could never live somewhere that demands such intimacy. The fiercely private or independent could find life by consensus cumbersome and exhausting. For cohousing enthusiasts, however, the arrangement encourages civility, communication and deeper, more meaningful relationships.

Since Puget Ridge was built in 1994, around 50 people have lived in the complex's 23 homes and cottages. The Craftsman-style, cedar-sided houses range from 650 to 1,800 square feet; nobody has a yard of their own. Instead, stone walkways connect the courtyards and lawns so everyone can play. Native plants and trees shelter the neighborhood from the street and give Puget Ridge an earthy, Northwest-forest feel.

"Puget Ridge is quintessential cohousing," says Charles Durrett, author of "Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Housing" and one of the early pioneers of the cohousing movement. "It feels very honest, open and Scandinavian."

While Puget Ridge's welcoming layout represents a departure from most city housing, its financial structure is fairly standard. The community operates much like a condominium complex, where most residents own their homes and pay their own mortgages. (Two people rent.) A 900-square-foot bungalow recently listed for $250,000. Prices vary depending on home size, but are typically comparable to other properties on the local market. Common dues pay for the property's utility bills and upkeep, and residents divide into committees to take care of the garden, tool shed, common house, lawns and other areas that need tending.

People interested in buying or renting at Puget Ridge must attend a community orientation to hear from residents what life is like here.

"People who live here have to embrace what's best for the community," Kennedy says. "If I wanted to do things my way, I'd have my own house."

COHOUSING IS neither new nor unique to Puget Ridge; it's just one of an estimated 124 such communities in the United States and many more in other parts of the world.

But the Puget Sound area is seen as one of cohousing's hotbeds, with 14 communities around the region from Bainbridge Island and Bremerton to Bothell and Monroe.

"There's a certain kind of cooperative energy in this region that encourages intentional communities and cohousing," explains Craig Ragland, executive director of the Cohousing Association of the United States, headquartered in Bothell.

The impetus for creating such communities here came in the 1980s after California architects Charles Durrett and Kathryn McCamant visited Denmark and fell in love with communities there. In 1988, Durrett and McCamant published the book "Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves," and the push was on.

Plans for Puget Ridge started taking shape after Paul Fischburg and his wife, Barbara Erwine, heard Durrett and McCamant give a talk illustrated with a slide show in Berkeley, Calif. They saw the pictures from Denmark, heard about the close, familial relationships that develop through cohousing and began dreaming about something similar for themselves.

"I was in tears after seeing the slide show," Fischburg says. "I thought, 'Why are we not living this way?' "

Fischburg and Erwine recruited Durrett and McCamant to travel to Seattle to give their presentation. They put up fliers on bulletin boards at coffee shops and PCC grocery stores. About 80 people turned out for the talk, and a dozen were so enthusiastic about the idea, they talked Durrett and McCamant into holding a workshop over an entire weekend.

Armed with ideas, Fischburg, Erwine and a few other committed individuals decided to start holding planning meetings every Sunday night. For Puget Ridge to take shape, the founders needed land. They decided upfront that they were city people and wanted to continue to be so. The group searched for space in Fremont, but soon determined the neighborhood would be prohibitively expensive for the amount of land they hoped to get. They talked about buying an apartment building south of downtown, but ultimately held out for something that would allow individual houses and green space.

The group began talking with the city of Seattle, which had recently passed a land-use code to allow planned residential developments such as Puget Ridge, where residences were clustered around common areas.

"The city was looking to reinvigorate neighborhoods around the city," says John Eskelin, who was a specialist for the city's Department of Community Development at the time. "We supported anything that helped re-energize areas and encourage diversity of housing types."

The city told the group about surplus city land in Delridge. The acreage had been purchased for a freeway project, but when the project fell apart the city needed to shed some property. Though the land wasn't within walking distance of cute cafes, theaters or restaurants, it was close to an elementary school, on a bus route and covered in lush greenery. Most importantly, it was affordable and available. So in 1992, the Puget Ridge Cohousing Association bought the land for $3.2 million.

To qualify for the bank loan to build the project, the association made sure that every single house was presold. All buyers needed to come up with some cash upfront, enabling the group to front the initial $500,000 required by the bank before construction could begin. Buyers tapped their own bank accounts, borrowed money or went to ex-husbands and family members. Some put in $50,000, while others could afford only a couple thousand. The group agreed that all money would be paid back, with interest, as the homeowners paid off their mortgages. Puget Ridge's founders wanted to make sure everyone had some financial investment in the community, so it wouldn't be too easy for anyone to abandon ship.

"The stakes for everyone were super high," Fischburg recalls.

"I think we started with a really good balance of idealism and practicality," Erwine says. "The first person we hired was a lawyer."

IT'S A BRIGHT Sunday afternoon and children are riding bicycles on the pathways as a teen strolls across the lawn, offering others a taste from a bowl of fresh-picked local strawberries. Three adults and a young boy who belongs to none of them, yet obviously feels comfortable away from his mother's side, are lounging on folding chairs, chatting. The elders sip wine and nibble from a plate filled with cheese, pita and asparagus.

"The whole concept of Puget Ridge is to encourage interaction," says Les Treall, one of the community's pioneers.

Some of that interaction goes beyond casual lawn conversations. Celebrations are big here and, according to Kennedy, "they're the best holidays I've ever had." For back-to-school night, cooks serve rootbeer floats and other kid-friendly fare. The children line up by age in the dining hall and say their name, age and what they're most looking forward to about going back to school.

To mark the winter solstice, the entire community gathers to "wake up the trees." They bang pots and pans and parade around the property, visiting each tree to encourage the return of life.

But aside from the fun, there's business to attend to, and work to be done. Residents hold community meetings in the common house once every three weeks. Typically three times each week, volunteers make dinner; people sign up for grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning. And three times a year, residents tackle a major on-site project with daylong work parties; half-day sessions are also scheduled three times a year. They share a cellar filled with wheelbarrows, lawn mowers, ladders, pitchforks and hand tools.

"Why would everyone go out and buy a drill when you can share them?" Kennedy explains.

Not everyone has found utopia at Puget Ridge. A few have moved out. Treall recalls a former neighbor who grew bothered by what he perceived as clutter and disorganization in the community tool cellar. Eventually, he left Puget Ridge.

"It takes a certain mindset," Treall concedes while admitting that even he struggled in the early years. When group meetings involved laborious, lengthy discussions over topics such as whether everyone should pool money for baby-sitting, Treall grew weary of the consensus process.

"I didn't want to talk about everything," he says. "I just wanted to do it."

But it took just a short stint back outside of Puget Ridge to remind Treall of why he'd come. After a divorce, he moved to a mother-in-law unit in Lake Forest Park. His landlord never once invited him inside the main house. They exchanged simple greetings and rent on the front porch.

"I missed the community," he says.

For two teenagers raised in Puget Ridge, cohousing has shaped who they are. Treall's daughter, Sidra Torcall, was born in Puget Ridge and is now 15. Camille Burke, now 17, moved to the community when she was just 2.

From an early age, they were told they could feel free to speak up in community meetings and share their thoughts in a circle. So while a lot of her friends complain they can't talk to adults, Burke says she's comfortable around them. Here, they "treat me as an equal."

Both girls also developed deep friendships with other kids in the community. Burke grew up alongside Annie Fischburg and considers her the sister she never had. Torcall, who's an only child, counts the other Puget Ridge kids as pseudo-siblings, and the adults as both peers and parents.

"I always have this amazing place to come back to," Torcall says. "I know that wherever I go, cohousing will be here to back me up."

To be sure, life at Puget Ridge isn't always seamless for teens finding their independence. Torcall calls her home, which is right in the middle of Puget Ridge, the "fishbowl house." It seems like neighbors can peer right into her bedroom window.

"Sometimes I want time alone with my friends and don't want to have to introduce them to my 50-person family," she says.

Burke can relate. Her friends joke by calling Puget Ridge "the nudist colony," and at times she wearies of exposing them to all her neighbors.

"Sometimes, if I bring a boyfriend home, he has to go through the cohousing test and meet everybody," Burke says. "You get opinions from everyone."

But for the most part, Torcall and Burke relish the memories. Torcall recounts dancing for four hours under a disco ball in the Puget Ridge common house on New Year's Eve. The next day, she and other residents made the annual trip to Lincoln Park for a polar bear plunge into Puget Sound. Torcall hasn't had her own coming-of-age ceremony yet, but she recalls Fischburg's Indian-inspired tent with fondness.

"It was the coolest thing in the world," Torcall says.

Burke, who is off to college this fall, expects she'll both relish her independence and miss the place she grew up in, noting, "I don't know any other way of life."

IN THE NEARLY 18 years since the first families bought into Puget Ridge, the community has seen two deaths, two marriages break up and a number of births. Nine children live here now. About half the community's family of 50 have lived here since Day One.

And now, parents are joining their children, completing a larger circle of life.

Fischburg's mother and father came just after Puget Ridge got started in 1994. His father has since passed away, but his mother is still with them. The family relishes the chance for multiple generations to live so close to one another.

A year ago, 87-year-old Irving Domash joined his daughter, Michele, at Puget Ridge after his wife died. He planned on staying just two weeks, yet liked it so much he has stayed on. Domash organizes regular billiards games and leads discussions on jazz.

"Living with people of all ages helps him stay positive," Michele Domash says.

Right after his wife's death, IrvingDomash visited assisted-living communities, but he didn't like the idea of being surrounded by old people. At Puget Ridge, he can eat dinner, play pool or garden alongside baby boomers, teens, kids and fellow seniors. And they'll treat him as one of their own.

"I'm 87 years old, so I figure I don't have much longer on this earth," he says. "I should spend it with family."

Heidi Dietrich is a Seattle freelance writer. Ellen M. Banner is a Seattle Times staff photographer.