“…There is something oddly alluring about smartly designed but freakishly small spaces. I know this because enough other people must be into these things to warrant the steady stream of them flowing from my Twitter feed. I also know this because I have never met a link promising a teeny tiny home that I was not compelled to click on.
So what is it about these places? I’ve got no interest in slide shows of the world’s most palatial mansions. But show me a studio the size of my kitchen, and I could stare at it all day.…”
Emily Badger in article titled: I Can’t Stop Looking at Photos of Absurdly Tiny Homes: https://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/03/i-cant-stop-looking-photos-tiny-homes/1443/
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:
“…There is something oddly alluring about smartly designed but freakishly small spaces. I know this because enough other people must be into these things to warrant the steady stream of them flowing from my Twitter feed. I also know this because I have never met a link promising a teeny tiny home that I was not compelled to click on.
Tiny homes are possible and honest, they can be photographed from up close and still be seen as a whole. They are intimate and playful and because of their economy of scale the best of materials can be used and each piece can be considered and placed with care and craft. There is a sense of sanity to a tiny house and I suspect their owners give them names.
I know I would.
tj
Also, if well-made, the small space requires less energy to keep heated than a large one. . . Nominally. But, compare it by square-footage.
A 24' on the side cube, with a peaked roof on top can accommodate 3 floors plus an attic, for a total floor area of 2304 sq ft. Comfortable for 4 people, with 576 sq feet per person.
The same shape building, when 12' on a side, could have a loft constituting a second floor, so the square footage is 288. Two could squeeze in there, but the floor space per person is 144, or one-forth that of the big one. (one-half if it's only one person).
The bigger one has four times the surface area, so expect four times the heating requirements, but it has eight times the volume.
So, it is twice as efficient in that sense. In addition it is easier and less wasteful to build one big one than eight little ones. And it disrupts less land area.
Huge and humongous is undesirable for other reasons, but all is not perfectly wonderful in a teensy-tiny home.
Some research should be done about the actual living experiences of people who live in them. For example, where do they put all their stuff?
One way is to sell it all at a yard sale, and give the rest to a thrift store. Others may be renting ever more space at a storage unit.