Library builder

Today’s market suggests that, for many of us, the perceived prestige of enor­mity takes precedence over design and even structural integrity when choos — sing a home. It seems that even a shoddy status symbol, with its expansive vinyl walls and snap-on plastic window grills, can somehow connote distinc­tion. The finer qualities of design have […]

"Economical” means doing only what is necessary to getting a job done. Anything more would be wasteful and contrary to the inherent simplicity of good design. An economical home affords what is essential to the comfort of its occupants without the added burden of unused space. Excess and economy are mutually exclusive. We can have […]

A small house is not merely as good as its larger correlate; it is better. A home that is designed to meet its occupants’ domestic needs for contented living without exceeding those needs will invariably surpass the quality of a bigger one in terms of sustainability, economics and aesthetics. Sustainability Under no circumstances does a […]

My reasons for choosing to live in such small houses include some envi­ronmental concerns. The two largest of my three, hand-built homes were made with only about 4,800 pounds of building materials each, less than 100 pounds of which went to the local landfill. Each produced less than 900 pounds of greenhouse gases during a […]

In 2005, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. I had heard a lot of horror stories about the price of properties in the region, so I sold Tumbleweed and built myself an even smaller house to take with me. I figured I had better have something I could parallel park, in case I […]

I had managed to side-step building codes by constructing not a building, but a "travel trailer.” With that stumbling block out of the way, I still faced a zoning problem. I want­ed to live in town, and, like most towns, Iowa City does not allow trailer camping just anywhere. You cannot just buy an old […]

Like the rest of the house, utilities and appliances were designed with sim­plicity and sustainability in mind. They met my modest needs but would be considered primitive by conventional American standards. These rudimen­tary utilities certainly would not appeal to everyone interested in living in a small home, and it should be made clear that living […]

It was not until after I thought I had al­ready finished designing my little dream home that I became familiar with the term “minimum-size standards.” Up to this point, I had somehow managed to re­main blissfully unaware of these codes; but, as the time for construction neared, my denial gave way to a grim reality. […]

The Airstream I have been living in houses of fewer than 100 square feet for nearly twelve years. The first of my little abodes was a fourteen-foot Airstream. I bought it in the summer of 1997 for three thousand dollars. It came as-is, with an aluminum shell as streamlined and polished as what lay inside […]

I live in a house smaller than some people’s closets. My decision to inhabit just 90 square feet arose from some concerns I had about the impact a larger house would have on the environment and because I just do not want to maintain a lot of unused or unusable space. My house meets all […]