Home configurations: let’s get SMALL, Part 1
Echoing Steve Martin’s insanely brilliant “Let’s get small” bit from Saturday Night Live:
I do take one drug now - for fun - and, maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s a new thing, I don’t know if you have or not. It’s a new thing, it makes you small.
[Indicates size with fingers.]
About this big.
Because I blog like — a wild and crazy guy!
… the New York Times provides a bit of fluff about ecophile home owners:
A wave of interest in … small dwellings — some to serve as temporary housing, others to become space-saving dwellings of a more permanent nature — has prompted designers and manufacturers to offer building plans, kits and factory-built houses to the growing number of small-thinking second-home shoppers. Seldom measuring much more than 500 square feet, the buildings offer sharp contrasts to the rambling houses that are commonplace as second homes.
Physics abounds in fundamental universal constants, like the speed of light in a vacuum, whose parameters are essential to the universe’s fabric, and in an otherwise lightweight New York Times bit of fluff about ecophile home owners, I discern a potential universal housing constant: the minimum habitable family space.
And groovy, man
Matthew Adams, 30, a
That’s infinitesimal ground coverage on his one quarter of a square mile.
From the beginning, Mr. Adams said, he had an ecological agenda and intended to serve as a steward of the former ranch property. “I was committed to finding a tiny house that would have no lasting impact on the land,” he said.
As we’ll see, Mr. Adams’ land impact extends beyond his home’s footprint, but we will give him credit for ingenuity.
Matthew Adams outside his 120-square-foot house by Modern Cabana on his 160 acres near Red Bluff,
“But truthfully, I wanted something with design value, too.”
Modern Cabana offered both. The structure rides on concrete piers, so there’s no need to pour a foundation.
Still, they have to be jackhammered deep into the soil.
To minimize waste, the builder, Nick Damner, works exclusively with eight-foot units of plywood, glass and wallboard. Recycled denim is used as insulation.
“It feels acutely more sheltering to be in a tiny house rather than a big one,” Mr. Adams said of the glass-and-wood structure, which sits like a jewel box on the land. “Looking out at the vastness of the environment heightens your sense of containment.”
The basic housing unit — walls, roof, door, and a one-room space
The 120 square feet Mr. Adams occupies resonates elsewhere around the world. Judging by the self-built housing I’ve seen in Kenya, South Africa and elsewhere, and the build-it-yourself houses sponsored by Cemex’s Patrimonio Hoy in Mexico, 120 square feet is as small as one can make a minimally viable self-contained dwelling — what my Mexican colleague Alberto Mulas calls ‘the embryo house.’
One-room house,
It’s possible to be even smaller, but this hardly sounds like even the most basic of dwellings:
WHEN John Friedman and Kristin Shepherd of
This is a truly mobile home, what the original Airstream trailers envisioned.
To compensate for the lack of interior space, the couple cook, entertain and, for the most part, live outdoors.
They have to.
Without heat and with minimal insulation, the structure is more like a framed tent than a house. It’s occupiable only in high summer, and even then, only with unusual tolerances:
“We live in our view rather than look at it,” said Ms. Shepherd, 58, a retired youth counselor and an avid hiker. At night the two nestle in a sleeping loft with three feet of clearance, gazing at stars through a skylight. “It’s shelter, pure and simple,” Ms. Shepherd said.
Simple, certainly; not entirely pure. For there is that bodily evacuation to deal with. The environment can handle it if the animals move lightly on the land, but when human density rises, sewerage is essential.
Problems arise only by comparison with larger structures:
Let’s … get … small
And, you know, I’ll be home, sitting with my friends, and, uh, we’ll be sitting around, and somebody will say, “Heeeyyy … let’s get small!” So, you know, we get small, and uh … the only bad thing is if some tall people come over. You’re walking around going, “Ah hahaha..!”
Now, I know I shouldn’t get small when I’m driving … but I was driving around the other day, and I said, “What the heck?” You know? So I’m driving, like —
[extends arms high in the air like he’s reaching up to a giant steering wheel]
Moving upward from the minimal one-room house, we encounter the efficiency apartment, just expressed as a free-standing home:
A wave of interest in such small dwellings — some to serve, like the Shepherds’ home, as temporary housing, others to become space-saving dwellings of a more permanent nature — has prompted designers and manufacturers to offer building plans, kits and factory-built houses to the growing number of small-thinking second-home shoppers. Seldom measuring much more than 500 square feet, the buildings offer sharp contrasts to the rambling houses that are commonplace as second homes.
This reduction of scale makes sense for a lot of people. Second homes are often geared toward outdoor activities, so for several months of the year interior space is superfluous.
Not precisely superfluous but certainly discretionary rather than mandatory.
Minimal square footage means reduced maintenance costs, less upkeep and reduced energy consumption.
Occupancy costs are measured by either cubic (total volume, as with heating/ cooling) or floor area (as in acquisition cost, most development and construction costs, and maintenance). Small housing is therefore cheap housing —
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
