Tiny Houses in Texas

(Brad Kittel’s Tiny Texas Houses are featured in Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter.)

Story by Ray Bragg, photo by Billy Calzada in San Antonio Express-News, December 25, 2011

“LULING – Although Brad Kittel runs a construction company, he’s really in the deconstruction business.

As owner of Tiny Texas Houses, located on hilltop that overlooks Interstate 10, he builds homes that are a fraction of the size of the modern McMansion. His basic sales pitch: sometimes a little is more than enough.


“This is about keeping it simple and building a new global consciousness,” says Kittel, a former land developer in Austin. “It’s no longer cool to have ostentatious houses. It’s no longer cool to have the biggest house on the block.”

The numbers agree with him.

The U.S. Census Bureau says the average size of new single-family homes dropped from 2,438 square feet to 2,377 last year. Surveys of builders indicate new homes will shrink 10 percent by 2015.

That trend, says blogger Kent Griswold, is being accelerated by the weakened economy.

‘For years, it was a dream for a lot of people who wanted to cut back as they got older,” says Griswold, who writes tinyhouseblog.com. “But in the last year or two, people have been forced to look at their money differently. They want to simplify and they don’t want to be saddled with a huge mortgage.…’”

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

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