http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/travel/20070216_TINY_FEATURE/blocker.html
The Next Little Thing?
LITTLE HOUSE ON THE FREEWAY Jay Shafer took his 90-square-foot house on tour this summer, rolling along a Los Angeles highway.
IN his 20s, Michael Janzen made pottery and lived in a cabin in rural California that he estimates was “about the size of a two-car garage.” After he married, he went into Web design for a bank, and now at 40 has all the trappings of a successful homeowner: in-ground pool, maid service, a yard landscaped with Japanese black pine bonsai trees. His 1,800-square-foot home in Fair Oaks, Calif., a one-story model by Streng Brothers, midcentury builders in the Eichler mold, is of a kind coveted by fans of modern design.
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THE LILLIPUTIAN LIFE Some homeowners are using their new little houses as offices or retreats, like the 80-square-foot one owned by Michael Janzen.
Others choose to actually live in theirs, like Dee Williams, whose 84-square-foot knotty-pine house has a tight but cozy interior.
So why has Mr. Janzen spent the summer building an 80-square-foot “tiny house” out of free stuff he found on Craigslist?
There he is on nights and weekends, designing a floor plan whose dimensions are measured not in feet but inches, nailing scavenged wood pallets together for the frame, or fixing up an old trailer to serve as the foundation. The initial reaction from his wife, Julia: “Is this a Unabomber building?”
Not exactly. According to Mr. Janzen, he came to the realization that “I don’t want this life — the life of someone who’s working too hard to pay a large mortgage to live in this house.” The catalyst, he said, was watching the value of his home plummet with the rest of the real estate market, while the time and money required to maintain the property only increased. “The energy cost is enormous,” he said, “and the bigger your property gets, the more there is to do.”
Which is why Mr. Janzen has become interested in the small house movement, whose adherents believe in minimizing one’s footprint — structural as well as carbon — by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept’s time has finally arrived.
“It’s a very exciting moment,” said Shay Salomon, a green builder in Tucson, Ariz., and the author of “Little House on a Small Planet” (Lyons Press, 2006), “because it feels like a chapter of American history might be ending, the chapter called ‘Bigger is Better.’ I’m not the Gallup poll, but I hear the same story over and over: We got rid of that big house, and now I have time to see my husband. Before, we used to work all week and then we’d spend the weekend on the house.”
Gregory Paul Johnson, a founder of the Small House Society in Iowa City, said that the notion of very small houses becoming popular was “an absurdity” five years ago. “But there are so many powerful forces at work right now,” he added, “like rising energy costs and the mortgage crisis. I think people want small homes because they cost less to purchase, maintain, heat.”
In July, Mr. Johnson, who lives in a 140-square-foot house made by the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company of Sebastopol, Calif., took to the road to promote his vision of living small, along with Jay Shafer, Tumbleweed’s founder. The two men drove from Victoria, British Columbia, to San Diego, pulling Mr. Shafer’s house behind them on a trailer. (Tiny houses, which rarely have foundations, are often built on trailers.)
Along the way they stopped to hold workshops and give (very brief) home tours. Some events drew hundreds of people. “It seems like everybody is fascinated by the idea of living in a tiny house,” said Mr. Shafer, who started Tumbleweed eight years ago. “But for a long time, I was just selling the dream.”
His business is still modest, but in the past year Mr. Shafer has sold five houses and 50 sets of plans, up from a yearly average of one house. The houses range in size from about 70 to nearly 800 square feet, cost $20,000 to $90,000 to build, and resemble birdhouses: boxy shape, wood siding and high, pitched roof.
Other builders also report increased demand. Brad Kittel, owner of Tiny Texas Houses in Luling, Tex., said he had built 10 homes this year, up from four in all of 2007.
In recent years, small dwellings have begun to get the high-design treatment, which could attract more people. The London-based designer Nina Tolstrup built the 388-square-foot Tiny Beach Chalet, which has drawn attention on design blogs. One of the stars of the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibit on prefabricated houses is the Micro Compact Home, a 73-square-foot cube by the British architect Richard Horden.
“When you build small you can spend money on higher-quality materials,” said Jared Volpe, a Web designer in North Ferrisburgh, Vt., who runs the blog smallhousestyle.com. Mr. Volpe said he is often amazed at how aesthetically pleasing many of the latest small homes are. In the year since he started his blog he has received increasing numbers of e-mail messages from people interested in small homes — a trend he attributes in part to the poor economy. “People will need to heat their 3,000-square-foot house this winter, and it’s going to cost double of what it did a few years ago,” he said.
For Mr. Janzen, a tiny house is not an immediate solution to his frustrations with large-scale living; he has no intention of cramming his wife and young daughter into 80 square feet. Instead, he plans to use the structure as an office, or park it on his in-laws’ farm as a weekend retreat, a more traditional use for tiny houses. But he will treat it as an “intellectual exercise,” he said, that will allow him to develop “an idea of the other extreme of size.”
“I’ll have a sense of where the balance is,” he added — a sense that he hopes will help his family decide on a reasonable goal for downsizing, something he is eager to do soon. “We bought this house, I think, for prestige,” he said, sounding chastened.
But while Mr. Janzen is dabbling with tiny living, others are plunging in. Tara Flannery, a 25-year-old college student in Seattle, plans to move within the next few months from the Craftsman-style two-story house she shares with roommates into a Tumbleweed house. The decision was largely financial.
“I wanted to buy my own place by 30, and the way the housing market is going that’s not going to happen,” she said, referring to the tightening credit market and the fact that home prices remain high in Seattle, despite the mortgage crisis.
In a way, Ms. Flannery’s tiny house, which will be about 100 square feet with a sleeping loft and will cost roughly $40,000, is a modern twist on the starter homes of the 1950s suburbs; it offers her a way into home ownership, of a sort, without the debilitating costs. “I can spend my money traveling instead,” she said.
It’s an unencumbered lifestyle that Dee Williams, a hazardous waste inspector an hour away in Olympia, Wash., has embraced. Four years ago, she sold her 1,500-square-foot bungalow in Portland, Ore., and downsized to an 84-square-foot house made of knotty pine that she built herself for $10,000 and parked in a friend’s backyard, where she lives free in exchange for helping her friend with chores. (She bathes in the friend’s house because her bathroom doesn’t have a shower, though most tiny houses do have both a shower and a toilet.)
Ms. Williams, 45, said that before the move, “I was an environmentalist, but not a very dedicated one.” She built her house, which she outfitted with solar panels and propane heating, both to “walk the talk” of eco-consciousness and “to unshackle myself from a mortgage and doing repairs.” Although last year, like most Americans, she saw a sharp rise in her monthly energy bill, the increase — from $4 to $8 — didn’t exactly bankrupt her, she said.
Mr. Janzen, meanwhile, worries that an activist like Mr. Shafer, the Tumbleweed founder, “would look at someone like me and say I’m only taking a half-step.”
Asked if that were the case, Mr. Shafer said he doesn’t advocate for everyone to live as he does. “I know 100 square feet is too small for most people,” he said, including his new bride, who lives next door to Mr. Shafer in a 700-square-foot house (although he is planning to build her a 300-square-foot replacement). Instead, he wants to be a living example encouraging people to downsize, even if it’s only to a moderately smaller home.
The Janzens plan to do just that, as soon as the housing market bounces back and they can sell their current home without taking a loss. The couple wants to move back to Mendocino County, where early in their marriage they lived in that 450-square-foot cabin. “I think I would have eventually said, do we really need all this?” Mr. Janzen said. “But it probably wouldn’t have happened until retirement. Now I hope my 40s will be about having free time and doing the things I want to do.”
Instead of Trading Up, Adding a High-Style Shed
HOME EXTENSION Small prefabricated sheds are gaining in popularity. Ryann and Dylan Perlstein play outside the one in their Los Angeles backyard. Their parents let them use the shed as a playroom for now, and their mother, Christina Simon, calls it “cool.”
THREE years after renovating their 1903 brownstone in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, Greg and Cheyenne Morris turned their attention to their backyard, which contained an odd assortment of disused items — sinks, toilets, Virgin Mary statuettes, wheels from street vendor carts and a moldering stucco garden shed. They cleaned up the yard, made preparations to demolish the shed and asked an architect to draft plans for a free-standing studio to be used as a bedroom and office.
AB PREFAB Cheyenne and Greg Morris, (with Jimmy), installed a Kithaus K4 aluminum shed in their Brooklyn backyard.
UTILITY ROOMS Christina Simon, right, and her husband turned their Modern-Shed unit in Los Angeles into a play space.
Marie Delahaye tucked her Modern Cabana shed behind her ranch house in Walnut Creek, Calif., to use for meditation and as an art studio.
The plans were drafted, but faced with the prospect of more construction, they chose to buy a Kithaus K4, an 11-by-17-foot prefabricated room designed by Tom Sandonato and Martin Wehmann. It arrived within three weeks of their mailing a deposit check, and took a week to assemble, without the hassle of permit applications or unexpected construction costs.
By late July, it sat handsomely beneath maple and pine trees at the end of the yard, a miniature modern pavilion. They celebrated on the evening of its completion by stepping inside to eat popcorn and watch “Freaks,” the 1930s cult classic.
“It was expensive,” said Mr. Morris, a photographer, who spent $76,000 for a Kithaus with a bathroom, ipe wood deck and louvers, “but it was worth it to not have any more contractors and electricians traipsing through my house.”
Tiny, high-style prefabricated sheds like the Kithaus have received a great deal of attention over the last year, with admiring coverage in design blogs and magazines, and roughly four times more companies producing them now than five years ago. So far, the market is still small, though a tipping point of sorts may have been reached this year, when Design Within Reach began selling the Kithaus, along with furnishing packages to turn it into an instant office, bedroom, pool house or den.
“In terms of popularity, these sheds are roaring ahead, in part because of their innate simplicity,” said Michael Sylvester, publisher of fabprefab.com, a clearinghouse of information about contemporary prefab homes. “They’re mobbed whenever they’re exhibited at design shows.”
In fact, the shed threatens to upstage full-scale modernist prefab homes, which have begun to lose their bargain appeal after years of hype. According to Mr. Sylvester, the most popular cost from $250 to $400 a square foot including installation, which is more than a frugal consumer would pay for a home built by an architect and contractor.
And for homeowners drawn to the kind of warm, willfully friendly modernism put forth by Design Within Reach, the new sheds represent a chance for flirtation without commitment. Buyers who would not choose to live in a full-scale prefab home might indulge in a small-scale fantasy of the California-modern lifestyle such houses represent.
Beyond that, there are plenty of practical reasons for the shed surge. As of 2004, more than 20 million Americans worked at least partially from home, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a 2006 Census study showed that more than five million Americans did so full time; for some, the shed provides an instant office at a convenient remove from household distractions.
“People are comfortable with the idea of working from home in a way that they weren’t just a few years ago,” said Ryan Grey Smith, founder of Modern-Shed, a small Seattle-based firm that has sold 130 room-size structures since it was founded in 2003, half of them in the last year. “Houses built 50 years ago don’t work for us that well today. People need offices more than they need, say, formal dining rooms.”
Whether homeowners use the shed for work, guest lodging or cocktails, the add-on space may be preferable to the dubious prospect of trading up in a housing slump.
There is also an element of immediate gratification. Sheds generally do not need foundations, and almost all are less than 120 square feet, which means they do not require permits in most states. Buying one is more like buying a car than a house.
But the new sheds have an appeal that goes beyond the practical: Like architectural follies in the Victorian garden, they draw people away from the distractions of home life to the tranquillity of the backyard. “It’s transformative,” said Matilda McQuaid, deputy curatorial director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. “You cross a threshold into another realm just a few steps from your home.”
The high-design shed appears to hold particular appeal for women, who rarely have much dedicated space of their own in the American home (unlike men, who have historically laid claim to home offices and dens). Roughly 60 percent of Modern-Shed’s customer inquiries, for example, come from women, according to Mr. Smith.
“The women are left out,” said Casper Mork-Ulnes, a founder of Modern Cabana, a San Francisco firm that has sold roughly 60 sheds in four years of operation, more than half to women. “They need a space away from the kids and television.” Nearly 80 years after Virginia Woolf described the need for a room of one’s own, these miniature buildings may be starting to address it.
Two years ago, Marie Delahaye bought a $15,000 shed from Modern Cabana as a personal retreat, tucking it behind the ranch house in Walnut Creek, Calif., that she shares with her husband and two children. “My husband isn’t consciously aware that he’s doing it, but he’s claiming more and more space in our home,” she said. “It was hard for me to even maintain my stuff in a corner.”
She got the shed a few months after turning 50, which she says was not a coincidence, and uses it for meditation and as a studio for art projects with friends. “It beats getting divorced,” she said.
For certain buyers, the shed may be an outlet for baby boomer remorse. Encumbered by mortgages and 5,000-square-foot homes, some Americans of means are looking for ways to reconnect with lost values of simplicity, sustainability and forthrightness — values that seem to be embodied by the sheds’ basic materials and designs. “For people my age, in their 50s, the dreams of their youth didn’t hold up, but now they have some resources and a little bit of land,” said Will Bruder, a Phoenix architect whose small, lightweight structures were one inspiration for today’s modernist sheds. “It’s about what could have been,” he added, “or what should have been.”
For others, though, the allure of modernist shed all comes down to looks. “From the moment I saw the pictures I fell in love with it,” said Christina Simon of the 12-by-16-foot Modern-Shed she and her husband installed behind their Los Angeles home last year. They ended up using it as playroom for their children, ages 5 and 8. But, she said, “we could have turned it into anything. What matters is that it’s cool, and we love looking at it.”
Small (Car, House) Is Beautiful
By Andrew C. Revkin
Fact or fantasy: Zero Pollution Motors plans to start building its air-powered car by 2011 at the latest. (Zero Pollution Motors)This is just a quick alert to encourage you to check out a couple of interesting small stories elsewhere in The Times.
One is a report on the Wheels blog by my friend Jim Motavalli about the possible rebirth of the “air car,” a vehicle that runs on compressed air and a small amount of fuel to run a heater that boosts its range (it is said to get the equivalent of more than 100 miles per gallon when you account for the energy it takes to compress the air). There’s lots more at the link above and in a story on the pneumatic-car technology written by Jim in 2000.
In Olympia, Wash., Dee Williams built this 84-square-foot house for $10,000. (Credit: Karie Hamilton for The New York Times)Another is a story about tiny houses, which resonated particularly because on Tuesday night I went to an art show in Beacon, N.Y., organized by friends, including the sculptor Simon Draper, who are building tiny free-standing artists’ “habitats.”
The Times story, by Steven Kurutz, descrbes a growing “small house movement, whose adherents believe in minimizing one’s footprint — structural as well as carbon — by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept’s time has finally arrived.”
Have a look and write a (small) comment. Below is a video showing Simon Draper building a tiny artist’s shed (set to music by the songwriter Dar Williams, for whom he’s also building a similar creative nook).What's On My Other Blogs today: (click blog name to go there) = / 1.3rd Eye Blog / 2. Favorites Blog/ 3. Vita Excolatur (Living Well ...) Blog/ 4. Humor Me Blog/ 5. News and Current Events Blog/ 6. Consider This ... Blog/ 7. Consumer Warnings Blog/ 8. New Orleans Pentimento Blog/ 9. We Constant Gardeners Blog/ 10. Chaillot Family Blog/
