Small Houses and the Question of Need

Carol Lloyd has a good article at SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle‘s site) on extremely tiny homes:

Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.

This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer,
who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming
next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage
and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern
California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office
space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and
magazines — many featuring his house on the cover. And from the
old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting:
an apple orchard in full bloom.

But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better,
calling Shafer’s home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron.
Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square
feet — smaller than many people’s bathrooms. But Jay Shafer’s dream
isn’t of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then
writ tiny.

Read the whole thing.