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By Kim Gifford
Pick up almost any contemporary decorating or
building magazine from Better Homes and Gardens to
Country Living to Fine Homebuilding and you will
likely find a story on tiny houses. People are using
them for home offices, writer’s retreats,
guesthouses, homes for returning children or aging
parents, and perhaps most incredible of all in this
age of “bigger is better” — their primary
residences. The possibilities are really limitless,
“there are so many different uses for these tiny
houses,” says Patricia Foreman who along with her
partner Andy Lee runs the Tiny House Company, LLC in
Buena Vista, VA and wrote A Tiny Home To Call Your
Own.
Definition of Tiny Houses
What constitutes a tiny house? Foreman characterizes
small houses as those between 1,000 and 500 square
feet and tiny houses as 500 to 120 square feet. Yet,
the definition of a tiny house seems open to
interpretation. In her book, Not So Big Houses,
Sarah Susanka wrote about homes that were over 2,000
to 3,000 square feet. David Howard, a Walpole, NH
architect who produces FirstDay Cottages — house
kits designed to be constructed by a novice over 15
weekends of intensive labor — feels that “tiny” may
not be an appropriate word. He talks about small
houses and little houses, but mostly he talks about
houses designed to accommodate the way we live.
“One of the things I’ve learned is everyone really
spends 99% of their time where hopefully there’s a
woodstove and a dining room table and cooking area
and a couch, and if that can be set up so that
anyone whose doing anything can talk to each other
then the room is a great success,” he says. “Then
you realize that that space probably needs to be 16
feet by 20 feet and that’s only 320 square feet. Add
a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom and that’s under
1,000 square feet. That’s where we really live.”
Perhaps Jay Shafer, owner of Tumbleweed Tiny House
Company, offers the most comprehensive definition.
He defines a tiny house as dependent on the person.
“An oversized house is based on all the space that
doesn’t get used. I never try to say what a small
house is because it is determined by the
individual’s needs — whatever meets the occupant’s
needs without exceeding them,” he concludes.
History of Tiny Houses
Among some of the more famous tiny houses are Thomas
Jefferson’s honeymoon cabin at Monticello and Henry
David Thoreau’s 150 square-foot writer’s retreat at
Walden Pond. Although tiny houses have populated the
American landscape since the days of the early
settlers, many attribute their renewed interest to
architect Les Walker who began writing about them in
the late 1980s. Yet, Howard notes there was a strong
interest in small houses a decade earlier during the
energy crunch of the 1970s.
“I figured if in dreary, damp England they can not
only do this, but make the house so elegant it’s
worth tearing down and bringing to the United
States, why can’t we do something like that?”
“One of the most popular books ever about housing
came right at the end of the energy crunch when the
children of the sixties were finally getting enough
money to talk about their own homes,” he says.
Howard refers to 30 Energy-Efficient Homes… You Can
Build by Alex Wade and Neal Ewenstein. This book,
which underscores the sustainable nature of small
houses, features one of Howard’s own tiny homes,
which he built in Alstead, NH in the 1970s. This
house was only 489 square feet, yet Howard and his
wife lived in it for seven years, raising two
children there.
“It is still the model for the idea that you live
with extraordinary dignity in a very small house,”
he says.
Tiny houses are certainly not an American concept.
In fact, as Howard notes “the rest of the world does
not live in 1,600 square foot houses. They live in
little apartments or huts or hovels. You could take
a 480 square foot house and nine out of 10 people in
the world would consider it the most luxurious thing
they could imagine living in.”
Even here in U.S. cities, people live in small
studio apartments that they pay thousands of dollars
a month for, he continues. In Europe, tiny houses
and cottages are common. In fact, in the eighties,
Howard was involved in a joint venture with a
European firm to take down 20 buildings in England
and reconstruct them here in the United States. This
project instigated one of the guiding principles of
his FirstDay cottages — that they be able to last
500 years.
“I figured if in dreary, damp England they can not
only do this, but make the house so elegant it’s
worth tearing down and bringing to the United
States, why can’t we do something like that?” he
says.
The Case for Tiny Houses
The reasons for choosing a tiny house are myriad.
“We don’t want to bash big houses, that’s not our
message, but smaller houses can provide niche
housing for people whose lifestyles warrant it,”says
Foreman.
Environmental
Tiny houses use fewer natural resources to build and
produce less construction waste. They require less
energy to heat and cool and take up less land.
“It’s a natural extension to think smaller when you
consider how we as a nation or a culture or a planet
use water and heat and all the resources that go
into houses,” confirms Foreman.
Economics
Tiny houses do contain most of the features of a
large house, thus, the cost to build them per square
foot is typically higher. Yet, since they have less
square footage overall, their total cost is less
than a large home. The cost to build a tiny house as
with larger ones varies greatly from house to house.
Among the houses Foreman’s company produces is a
10-foot x 22-foot cabin known as the Copper Top,
which sells for approximately $25,000. It features a
copper roof, bay window, octagon window, white cedar
shingles, window boxes, Anderson Thermopane windows,
doors with screens, and a sleeping loft. In addition
to a shower, toilet and lavoratory, it has a
12-gallon hot water heater and is fully wired and
plumbed. The kitchen features a double bowl sink,
under-counter refrigerator, microwave oven, cabinets
and pantry.
Jay Shafer’s Tumbleweed Tiny House Company offers
even smaller houses. His 100 square-foot, “Emerson,”
which features two gothic windows, a cathedral
ceiling, vented sleeping loft for two, retractable
table and vanity, more than 200 cubic feet for
storage, a double burner, shower, toilet, six-gallon
water heater, a stainless steel counter,
refrigerator and sink, starts at around $14,000.
“You can put more money into the quality of the
house because you are spending less on quantity,”
concludes Shafer, who recently sold his 100-square
foot house to build one that is 7 foot by 10 foot.
“I have everything I need,” he says. This includes a
4-foot by 1.5-foot desk, a tiny kitchen, and a couch
for two, as well as a lot of storage.
Howard’s First Day Cottages, many of which are under
1,000 square feet, cost less than $40,000 to build.
“The most important thing to understand is that most
people are not doing this because they are poor.
They are doing this because they want to be rich,”
says Howard. “If you can build your own house for
$40,000 on a piece of land you paid $20,000 for,
with an infrastructure you paid $20,000 and you get
into the house for $80,000 then you are rich. If you
pay $160,000 for a run-down piece of junk, you are
poor.”
Lifestyle Choice
Many people choose tiny houses for personal reasons.
Shafer, for example, grew up in a big house. “I just
don’t want to deal with all the extra stuff that I
don’t need, including the extra space that has to be
heated and cleaned,” he says.
“Fifty-seven percent of American households are
single-head of the house with one or at the most two
people living in them, so why are we building these
standard three bedroom, two bath, 2,500 square feet
and up houses, when most of us don’t need that big
of a place on that much land?” asks Foreman.
All too frequently, houses are designed with wasted
space, says Robert Haight, an architect in Windsor,
VT. “Tiny houses just make too much sense.”
Considerations
All the experts agree that those considering a tiny
house weigh their needs, eliminating as much
frivolous space as possible and come up with a good
business plan. Shafer says guests who visit his tiny
house, typically think its great.
“They start thinking and conclude ‘I can do this,’
or they think it’s great, but realize they can’t.
Most people haven’t had time to think about what
their spatial needs are and their needs in general.
A house really exemplifies and embodies all our
material needs,” he says. |
