
How to live large in a tiny house - wheresclark
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/where-we-live/wp/2015/04/06/how-to-live-large-in-a-tiny-house/
======
stickfigure
I love the idea of tiny houses (and not-so-tiny houses like this one) clumped
around a much larger shared space. I love it so much that I'm part of a
(currently) seven party consortium trying to find rural acreage in
unincorporated parts of the outer SF Bay Area to build such a thing. What
we've discovered is that zoning ordinances in every county of California are
openly hostile to the idea. The general rule is basically one ginormous
single-family home (with a single kitchen) per parcel. Sometimes a second, but
that's pretty much it.

It might be possible to get variances or special permits from friendly
planning departments, but it's hard to convince a group of people to make
large $ investments in dreams which could be destroyed arbitrarily by changing
political winds. We may take the risk anyways, but our problem has gone from
practical matters of structure and finance to a fundamentally political one.

This is really a shame. I suspect that a lot of people, like us, would be
perfectly happy in low-footprint small (<500 sq ft) homes as long as they had
easy access to a fancy kitchen, home theater, storage, etc in a space shared
with a dozen of their friends. I always wondered why this isn't common - and
the answer is, at least in California, it's effectively illegal.

~~~
noamyoungerm
Your idea is basically a smaller version of a Kibbutz (excluding the shared
finances). Interesting to see that kind of approach pop up in the US.

~~~
tsotha
Utopian communes in the US predate the Kibbutz by almost 100 years. They
mostly died out by the early 1900s.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_Utopian_commun...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_Utopian_communities)

------
design-of-homes
I live in the UK, and the tiny house movement appears to be a uniquely
American phenomenon. The US is lucky to have so much open space which lets
people build their own homes. The reason these tiny homes don't feel cramped
is because they're surrounded by nature, with beautiful long uninterrupted
views out of the windows. No noisy neighbours or traffic nearby either.

But take away the countryside location of these homes and could the tiny house
work in an urban environment? I'm doubtful. The future for housing for most
people on the planet (including the US) is in cities and urban environments.
Can you live in a tiny home where you don't have long, uninterrupted views out
of your windows? Or where you only have windows along one side of your
dwelling (e.g. single-aspect apartments). Do you feel you have enough privacy
when your apartment or house is joined with your neighbours' home?

Millions of people already live in homes like this and have to contend with
these issues. The challenge for homebuilders and architects is to design
housing to address these issues: homes that give us light, space, privacy,
quiet and comfort in a noisy urban setting. Sadly, if I look at the new build
housing going up in the UK I'd say architects and house builders are doing a
pretty poor job of it. Are things better in the US in this regard?

Also, space can be 'modest' in size rather than micro or miniature and still
be sustainable or amenable to high density. For example, London has it's own
housing design guide that recommends new one bedroom apartments for _two
people_ to be a minimum of 50 square metres (538 square feet). That's still
less than space standards in continental Europe but it's enough space to live
comfortably even if it doesn't count as tiny by Western standards.

~~~
xasos
> The future for housing for most people on the planet (including the US) is
> in cities and urban environments.

I agree. Skyscrapers would provide the best bang for buck in terms of space.
You could fit a lot more people into a city like San Francisco.

~~~
jellicle
As a general rule, skyscrapers _don 't_ increase density much, as most of the
space is taken up by elevators, plumbing, electrical, and so forth. A block of
five-floor walkups is almost as dense as a 50-story tower-with-empty-space-
around-it, and much less expensive to build.

Walkups, not skyscrapers, are the best bang for the buck.

~~~
Dylan16807
How much space around the skyscraper? Surely at least half of each floor is
usable, right? I can't find any normal tower floor plans that differ.

Ten times as many floors is a lot of floors...

~~~
design-of-homes
This is an excerpt from a book called _At Home in the City: an introduction to
urban design_ which explains how the same plot of land can accomodate
different types of development and different densities. Medium-rise blocks can
match and exceed the density of high-rise blocks - see the attached pic in the
excerpt below for an example:

 _" In 1972 Leslie Martin and Lionel March published a cogent analysis of the
key forms of urban development. They postulated that on any given site
development can take three basic forms which they called 'pavilion','street'
and 'patio'. These forms cover different proportions of the ground area.

If developed with buildings of the same height and depth the pavilion form
would provide the lowest density and the patio form the highest. On the other
hand, constructing a given amount of floorspace would need buildings of
different height depending on which form they took. Figure 2.2 illustrates
this principle [see: [http://imgur.com/LmJ1tTg](http://imgur.com/LmJ1tTg) ].
It shows that the same amount of floorspace could be built on the same site as
a fifteen-storey tower block, five-storey linear blocks or a three-storey
perimeter block."_

~~~
Dylan16807
Interesting, but they seem to be keeping the floorspace constant on purpose
there. With such a narrow tower you could fit four on that plot!

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datashovel
I have a project that I eventually want to get off the ground. It has to do
with improving how we build houses by making all interior structure modular.

I don't necessarily think "small" is the way to think about it. Instead if a
family lives in a house for decades their priorities / needs change. So, for
example, the retired couple who still live in the house with 2 bedrooms for
their children when they first bought the house.

Or what about the house that's available and in an ideal location and has all
the right things, but it's a one-bedroom with plenty of square feet, but where
will the kids sleep?

If you had a modular way of reconstructing the interior of the house, and they
redo the walls using inexpensive modular components, all of a sudden maybe now
their master bedroom is twice the size it was, or maybe that space becomes a
loft / sitting area instead.

Suddenly it makes sense that a family could reasonably expect to live in the
same house over long periods of time comfortably, if it suits them, no matter
the changing circumstances that life presents them.

EDIT: And make far better use of the space they have over time as
circumstances change.

~~~
ayuvar
A place here in town builds modular office environments that have snap-
together walls, etc. Sort of like huge cubicles that are grown all the way up
instead of slapped together. They have giant metal base plates that you
install on the exterior walls of the floor and then you click your "fake
walls" into them at right angles. You can even get sound deadening panels or
colour inserts that slide inside the walls.

I asked one of the guys on the tour why they don't do it for houses. He
replied that the problem with houses is that it's rare to find houses that are
actually built with enough precision to have perfectly square corners and
perfectly vertical walls. It doesn't really make sense to go to that extent
for a narrow-margin stickbuilt 2- to 3-storey dwelling that doesn't support
the immense weight of an office building.

The modular idea could still work. You'd just have to add this little hacky
layer in between to adapt the out-of-plumb house bits to the injection-moulded
modular walls or whatever. I dunno what that layer would look like and still
be cheaper than making changes to a home the traditional way.

Good luck if you do it, I can't wait to buy it.

~~~
spitfire
USM, a Swiss modular furniture company built a modular building platform back
in the late 60's. It was based on the same idea as their furniture - a
scaffolding+panel design.

Unfortunately it didn't take off then, only a few buildings were built with
it. It's a shame because it looked very modern, very cool, and frankly I'd
like to own one of those buildings.

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patcheudor
"(why the standard ceiling height in this country is 8 feet is a concept I
will never understand)"

One word: efficiency

Tall ceilings create a heating and cooling nightmare. In my area a number of
builders over the last two decades came into the valley from warmer climates
like Arizona and built a bunch of homes with very tall ceilings. People loved
them and they kept building, then a cold winter comes along and people
complain about their $800/month+ heating bills in what was claimed to be an
energy efficient home.

~~~
nostromo
Two words: ceiling fans. :)

My house has a tall main room that spans two floors. People ask me why I have
the fans on in the winter... and I tell them that it keeps our heating costs
down. It's counterintuitive, but true.

~~~
frik
Wow, eye opening, and actually quite logic given that warm air travels to the
top.

~~~
saalweachter
Ceiling fans actually have a little toggle on the side to switch from 'blow'
to 'suck'. Doing so circulates the air without the direct 'breeze' across your
skin which may chill you.

------
tuna-piano
A couple more pictures here:
[http://www.caswelldaitcharchitects.com/mountainhome/uvoyzzub...](http://www.caswelldaitcharchitects.com/mountainhome/uvoyzzubo4twa7ero1203qz54svuh6)

------
unimportant
ITT bay area people that can barely afford to buy a studio apartment cause
prices be cray and they can only dream about having a tiny house.

This is how it's done in Europe:

[http://humble-homes.com/heijmans-one-affordable-tiny-
house-a...](http://humble-homes.com/heijmans-one-affordable-tiny-house-
amsterdam/)

~~~
raverbashing
To be fair, Europe is packed with barely liveable spaces being rented/sold at
exorbitant prices

Yes, I'm talking about the UK (and Ireland)

~~~
bosie
is the uk really that bad though? i feel like most flats outside of london are
reasonably priced. london z1/2 on the other hand... ;)

~~~
bigohk
This could be an entire discussion on it's own :) , if you are in the U.K.
then see what Crossrail is doing to property development and prices. Wherever
a building/construction company find's permission to build, they are building
blocks of flats. That should have an expected outcome of price dilution due to
availability BUT doesn't seem like that's happening. The worse thing I fear
that may happen is that areas which have houses at the moment may start
converting into areas with flats. There already are more than one examples of
that happening in the area I live. Decent areas of London are out anybody's
price range. Too many straight out cash buyers wanting to park their monies
:-/

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analog31
That's pretty cool. For better worse, a pre-condition for living in a tiny
house is having the land to build one on. For my family, an amenity of our
somewhat larger house happens to be its location, among nice neighbors, near
public transit, and within walking or biking distance to all of our daily
destinations such as work and school.

~~~
bmelton
So, you _can_ build portable tiny homes, though that constrains the tininess
even more so.

Another pre-condition is being in a city with tiny house-friendly zoning regs.

As someone who frequently entertains the notion and novelty of tiny living, I
keep up with it, and know more than a few folks who have been evicted from
their tiny homes.

D.C. has actually been making it harder to live in tiny homes, as they are
non-conformant structures in which you can "camp", temporarily, but cannot
live, so there's this shell game going on of tiny home dwellers rotating out
their dwellings just frequently enough to be on the right side of the law.

~~~
ianlevesque
What laws or regulations have caused the people you know the most trouble? I
remember some stories in the past about sewer or water regulations causing
problems, but not for tiny houses.

~~~
wlesieutre
A lot of towns have minimum square footage requirements that are too high for
tiny homes to be legal

~~~
toomuchtodo
That's slowly changing; stop by
[https://www.reddit.com/r/tinyhouses](https://www.reddit.com/r/tinyhouses) for
details.

------
nandemo
This is my idea of _tiny house_ :

[http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/products/cypress](http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/products/cypress)

------
danans
While it's not nearly as small as the one in the article, my house is on the
smaller end of many Bay Area homes (1600 sqft on a very narrow lot). But
nobody who visits believes that it's only 1600 sqft - they all think it's
closer to 2000, probably because the architect vaulted the entry/living-room
ceiling to 15ft, and the upstairs bedrooms to 13 ft.

What's harder about living in a small house as your primary home (not a
vacation home like the article) is storage space, especially when you have
kids.

There are also clever ways of doing built-in storage in a small home that
minimize the use of living space. Of course you also can't be a packrat.

I recommend Dwell magazine as a great source for small living space design
ideas.

~~~
lucaspiller
I find it ironic that you call 1600 sqft "small". Here is a pretty standard
700 sqft house in the UK that a family of 4 would comfortably fit in - I
wouldn't really call this small:

[http://m.zoopla.co.uk/for-
sale/details/36576725?search_ident...](http://m.zoopla.co.uk/for-
sale/details/36576725?search_identifier=ebac26e1115e16a6599b7e27c778c8c2)

~~~
maxerickson
It isn't surprising, the US is relatively empty compared to the UK. California
is about 40% the density of the UK, the citified regions of the east coast are
denser than the UK average, but that is about it.

There are also substantially different histories in play (when was the last
time the UK government was giving 65 hectares to anybody that asked?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts)
).

~~~
alricb
_when was the last time the UK government was giving 65 hectares to anybody
that asked?_

I think it was a bit after 1066, if you had the good luck of being Norman and
if William was feeling generous that day.

------
hueving
If I were to buy something like one of these tiny houses on a trailer[1], is
there a place to set it up in the bay area for a reasonable cost?

1\. [http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/](http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/)

------
olalonde
And here's how to live large in an actual tiny house:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQM7a5Yjp9g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQM7a5Yjp9g)

~~~
stickfigure
I thought you were going to post this link:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6pj3jVgeh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6pj3jVgeh8)

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ipsin
It's a vacation home that looks fairly secluded, has big windows and nice
furniture. Am I just too paranoid? This seems like the sort of thing that's
due for an inevitable burglary. That's one attraction to me of the cargo
container homes, despite the terrible aesthetic. If you need to go on an
extended trip, you can just throw a cargo lock on the front door and be done
with it.

~~~
ghaff
>Am I just too paranoid?

Pretty much :-) Not really different from just about any other house in a more
or less rural environment.

------
jacquesm
This is one of my favorite tiny houses:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSzgh3D7-Q0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSzgh3D7-Q0)

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delbel
*vacation house

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Which therefore they're not "living in" in the common sense of the phrase but
are "holidaying in". Rich people, pah.

"I work my office job from a toilet cubicle. You guys paying for offices are
schmucks. Here's how I do it, I go to the toilet for free right next door to
my office space I rent for $5000/mo. I'm working in entirely cost free space
for the whole day. Then for the other 8 hours 45 minutes of my 9 hour day I
work from the office. See, it's easy; can't see why people don't do this
more!"

/tired, bad humour

------
alexun
This is a good manual for hackers. I live on tight budget and it's preety
tought to have a room by myself with a lot of space

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makeitsuckless
"Tiny house"

A vacation house bigger than most people I know can afford for their actual
home. And than the author speaks of "making sacrifices". Makes me want to
throw up.

~~~
quanticle
How can you say that? I don't actually see the square footage of the house
mentioned anywhere, but it doesn't appear to be overly large (once you account
for the optical tricks the author used to make the space appear larger than it
is). My estimate would be somewhere around 800 sq. ft., which isn't
unreasonable for a vacation home.

~~~
zwischenzug
We're a family of four living in 550sq foot. Maybe I should write an article.

~~~
brightsize
House? You're lucky to have a house. We used to live in one room, all twenty-
six of us, no furniture, half the floor was missing, and we were all huddled
together in one corner for fear of falling.

~~~
zwischenzug
Glad someone got the irony. Where I grew up we couldn't afford irony.

