Small houses
From Sanctuary magazine issue 9. Buy or subscribe.
By Fiona Negrin
The Small House movement is to homes what the Slow Food movement is to dinner: a celebration of sustainability, simplicity and nourishment. It’s a trend that’s gained momentum in recent years thanks to the trifecta of increasing climate change awareness, the global financial crisis and rising real estate prices.
The Small House movement is most active in the US, where people of all ages and incomes are foregoing “trophy” houses for small, even tiny, abodes that free up their time and money.
After transport and agriculture, housing is the most resource-intensive industry in the western world, according to Shay Salomon, author of one of the movement’s defining books, Little House on a Small Planet. “There’s an enormous amount of destruction required for construction,” Salomon says, “both in clearing the land and then in all the materials that go into the building, and then all the long term costs that go into running those buildings”.
Salomon co-founded the Small House Society with Jay Shafer, Nigel Valdez and Gregory Paul Johnson in 2002. Jay Shafer’s guiding philosophy is “dream big, build small.” At 30 square metres, the first tiny house Shafer built is so modest it’s blushing, but he credits it with transforming and “uncluttering” his life.
Ten years on, Shafer has built 12 tiny houses, lived in three different ones, and become an ardent spokesperson for the movement. He’s written The Small House Book and started his own company, Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, to provide plans and build small houses for others.
Gregory Paul Johnson, author of Put Your Life on a Diet: Lessons Learned from Living in 140 Square Feet, lives in a diminutive house designed and built by Tumbleweed Tiny Houses. It’s a freestanding, movable, battery-powered house that was conceived as being part of a community of tiny houses where common resources like kitchen and laundry would be shared.
At three by two metres square, you can buy wardrobes bigger than Johnson’s house, dubbed “the Mobile Hermitage”, but it’s an exemplar of creative solutions to space constraints, with all areas performing multiple functions. A queen-size loft bed is accessed by a fold-away ladder, the computer workstation converts to a two-seater dining area, and “tables and surfaces seem to come out of the woodwork on demand as needed”. Indeed, space-saving innovations are a distinguishing feature of tiny houses.
It might sound like a competition to out-tiny your neighbour, but the Small House Movement welcomes dwellings of all sizes and maintains that small is relative. “A space that might be considered small for a family of four would be large if only a single person were living in it,” says the Society.
Shay Salomon is open about the fact that living in a tiny house presents challenges, including the need to tidy more often. But she says the financial, emotional, environmental and health benefits of living in a small house outweigh the obstacles.
Coming back to the idea of slow food, Shay offers the last word on small living. “Sustainability is a question of sustenance. When you can get in touch with the reality around you, you realise there’s plenty of sustenance for everyone, and the sustainable way of doing things is to feed the whole world just exactly what it needs, and not too much.”
Small houses online
www.resourcesforlife.com/small-house-society
The online hub of the Small House Society is a focal point for the movement and offers a wealth of resources for smaller, more sustainable living.
www.susanka.com
Architect Susan Susanka’s The Not So Big House, published in 1998, is considered a seminal text of the Small House movement. Her website includes a book shop, home plans for sale, presentations and more.
www.tumbleweedhouses.com
Jay Shafer’s website includes home plans, a book shop, his blog and FAQ.
www.tinyhouseblog.com
Based in the USA, this website has a good online book shop with many Small House related titles.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZM2G-PfEbc
This four-minute film about Dee Williams, who built and lives in her own tiny house on wheels, was considered so inspiring that Yahoo posted it on their home page.
www.tinyhouseforum.com
Free-ranging discussion about tiny houses and simple living.
www.smalllivingjournal.com
A bi-weekly webzine about small living, including a useful blogroll.
www.jaystinyhouse.com
Justin Peer’s blog details the process of building his tiny house in a London backyard. Justin’s effort is notable also for the fact that he’s sourcing most of his materials second-hand from eBay, dumpsters and other salvage spots.
