Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the October 16, 2014 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.
The small-house phenomenon is a social and architectural movement that is sweeping the United States. It is a helpful trend for those who yearn to make their lifestyle sustainable … or for those who wish to deliberately downsize, or for those who want a little of both.
The revelation about the small house movement is that small houses are actually nothing new. Most of the world’s inhabitants have lived in small homes like dug-outs, pit-houses and igloos throughout history. Only a small percentage of civilization have lived in palaces, mansions and castles. In fact, some might say that the American Tiny House movement has its roots in our very own Henry David Thoreau and his little, idyllic home on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.
Small houses such as Quonset huts were designed for World War II soldiers the George Fuller Company. The company was founded by George A. Fuller, who was born in Templeton, MA in 1851. He took an architecture course after graduating from college, and then went to work in Worcester, helping to design Newport mansions. The famous Newport mansions were, of course, slightly bigger than the 720 square feet of the Navy Quonset hut that his company created years later in 1941. After the war, Quonset huts were bought by returning veterans and others who could afford only small living space. Other small homes have been mobile homes and houseboats, popularized in the United States in the 20th century. Those house trailers have their origins in the Irish caravan, or itinerant traveler’s homes, which originated in the 16th century. They are, in fact, still in use today.
Sarah Susanka popularized the recent small house crusade with her book “The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live” (1998). She stressed the concept that a house, a Not-So-Big- House, “favors the quality of its space over the quantity.” In the late decades of the 20th century, Americans began to think in terms of bigger homes; those homes boasted vaulted space and many more rooms (dedicated to laundry, fitness equipment, wine, breakfast eating, and crafting.) Homes like these, Susanka claims, are designed to “impress rather than nurture.” She believes that we need to design our homes to express the way “we actually live” – not the way we want others to think we do. Susanka followed up her 1998 bestseller with “Creating the Not So Big House” in 2000 and “Inside the Not So Big House” in 2005. The beauty of her books is in the hundreds of photographs or examples of smaller living spaces that work for the people that live in them.
In “Little House on a Small Planet” (2006), Shay Solomon tells homeowners to “Go outside. I mean it. Right now.” The small house movement actually emphasizes homes built with outside-living in mind – turning to patios, sleeping areas, gardens, and outdoor kitchens to let the outside in. Too many of us spend our lives within the walls that burden us.
I can’t profess that I a follower of the small-house movement. While I live and work in Norwood, I have a second home on the south coast where our family of four adult children, their spouses, our grandchildren, and friends come to visit. However, I must confess that downsizing and shaping a life less encumbered by stuff and space is a sometimes-romantic fantasy. In fact, this past spring, I was anxious to read “The Big Tiny: A Built-It Myself Memoir” by Dee Williams (2014) as soon as it was published in April.
A resident of the Pacific Northwest, Ms. Williams chose to take on the small-house project after she discovered she suffered from heart disease. She had restored a lovely antique home with more rooms than she knew what to do with and, after this brush with death, she decided to build a tiny house - an 84 square-foot home on wheels. Her memoir is one of courage, mistakes, honesty and freedom. Williams is one of the many small-home owners who are portrayed in the documentary “Tiny: A Story About Living Small” (2013) by Christopher Smith. Smith bought a 5-acre plot in Colorado and decided to spend a summer building a home on wheels (similar to Williams.) Three months in, Smith and his girlfriend Merete Mueller discovered that the tiny house was far more challenging to build than they had anticipated and Mueller had doubts whether she could actually live within the confines of such small space. Smith and Mueller succeeded in completing the house in 2012– and the documentary in 2013. They made the move to the sweeping Colorado vista that Smith so loved. Following Smith and Mueller several years later, however, finds them only visiting, not living in, the less-than 200 hundred square-foot house where it now sits in Boulder, Colorado.
If you are interested is learning more about building and designing a small house, there are several books about creating small houses that are new on our library’s shelves: “Tiny House Design and Construction Guide” by Dan Louche (2012) and “Small Home, Tiny House: Budget, Design, Estimate, and Secure Your Best Price” by Jobe David Leonard (2014). Perhaps a tiny home is your idea for an escape. If so, then “How to Build Your Dream Cabin in the Woods” by J. Wayne Fears in its latest 2014 edition. Costs, photographs, blueprints and diagrams are included. Perhaps, somewhere on your property, you have space for a fort or shack. In that case, you might find Derek Deidricksen's self-published book helpful. It has a title crazier than his ideas: “Humble Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Ramshackle Retreats, Funky Forts, and Whatever the Heck Else We Could Squeeze in Here” (2012).
If you search the Minuteman Library catalog, you’ll find dozens of books on small and tiny houses. Some, like “500 Small Houses of the Twenties” by Henry Atterbury Smith (1990) prove that this is not a new idea. Others, like “Tiny Homes on the Move” (2014) describe some people’s need to be able to pick up and head out on the road or on water. Author Lloyd Kahn also wrote “Tiny Homes, Simple Shelter” (2012) and focused on the creative owners who live in them.
