• 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.