It depends very much on the subject. For example, I could actually live 100 miles away from my university and go there only every 3-4 weeks for supervision meetings, provided that I had access to the archives I need to research and possibly an Athens password to browse journals. If you are in a humanities or social sciences subject, this could be a solution, altought maybe you should agree first with your university how many times a month would you be required to travel, etc. In lab-based subjects I suppose it's much more difficult.