![]() We look down onto a bay as wide as a smile bordered by a harmonious gaggle of harbourside buildings and a rank of beach umbrellas between shore and tamarisk trees. While the house’s two rooms are a snug fit, life enlarges the moment you step outside. Luckily, I had intuited the importance of sun and sea before embarking on the “Mediterranean diet” necessary to slim down our lives enough to wriggle into 400 square feet of stone, and wander on a Greek island. The consensus is clear: tiny homes are best appreciated from outside. A couple in Arkansas despair “How can you grow a human in that space?” after trying to live in each other’s pocket for 18 months.Ī retired couple find their tiny home perfect as a second home when the sun is shining, and their living space is doubled by their patio, but are only too happy to up-size to their rancher when the weather confines them to one room and a rain-soaked view. ![]() ![]() There are others whose ardour for tiny living wanes over time. “It’s good we’re leaving while we still like each other,” observes one of her sons, and she concludes “it is the ocean that brings us back each year.” The tiny home’s beautiful sunny terrace. In “Teeny Homes, Big Lies” ( Globe & Mail, January 6, 2016), writer Erin Anderssen reports that, after 10 weeks in their summer cottage the size of a birdhouse, her family looks forward to real rooms and private spaces. And just as often become the project’s Achilles’ heel. The savings, the prudent use of space and materials, and the keen sense of familial togetherness that micro-housing engenders are all outcomes that invariably delight owners. Optionally outfitting the tiny home with wheels, enabling the owner to roost where conditions were most favourable (often within a community of other tiny-home dwellers), reduced the home’s footprint even more.Ĭonvincing in its philosophical form, the reality of living in a tiny home has met with varying degrees of success. Maximizing energy efficiency and using space-saving equipment and appliances ensured that the tiny home met the desired environmental goals. Building codes set the maximum size for a tiny home at 400 sq ft or less (another 50 sq ft would vault it into the “small house” category).Įconomic use of space – utilizing furniture and fixtures that could double as storage spaces and optimizing the house’s vertical space (like installing a mezzanine floor to house a sleeping loft) – became essential to the design of a breathable micro-house. Initially, the “rules” of this tiny-home-inspired diet were stringent. With the size of an average home in North America rising from 1,780 sq feet to 2,662 sq feet between 1973 to 2013, and consumer debt in Canada reaching two trillion by 2016, reducing the size of one’s home demanded a serious rethink about our domestic needs. Photo by J Kathleen Thompson.Ī subsequent memoir by one of the founders of the Small House Society entitled Put Your Life on a Diet (Johnson, 2008), added a graphic punch to the movement, and the urgency of eschewing runaway consumption and wastefulness. ![]() Interior view of the tiny home in Greece. With “The Not So Big House” (1997), American architect Sarah Susanka’s treatise on the “build better, not bigger” concept in residential architecture, homeowners began to seek ways to live more simply and sustainably. The notion of downsizing our homes, and lifestyles to fit them, appeared on our radars about 20 years ago. Its bones, however – small, strong and simple – made it a poster child for that trend in housing this side of the pond known as the tiny house movement. It had plenty of features that were undeniably vintage Greek: the spacious stone terrace, the outside-accessed bathroom, the obligatory whitewashed walls and wooden shutters, the uncomplicated kitchen (a fireplace and good-for-gutting-fish sink), and its enjambment in the warp and weft of a tightly knit village. Little did I know that a sideways glance at a small traditional house on a Greek island would lead headlong, at the age of 60, into the ownership of what many might call “a tiny home.” ![]()
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