By Anne Waldron Neumann
I have a new obsession: tiny houses. That’s tiny houses as in "Tiny House Movement:" small homes, usually wood, often built on the back of a utility trailer. The average American house is now around 2,500 square feet; tiny houses might be a tenth that size.
Tiny houses are obviously the ultimate in downsizing, but they also make great starter homes. For $10,000 or $20,000, you can buy and assemble a kit, or have one built. How wonderful to begin — or complete — your adult life in a mortgage-free house that you can heat for pennies and clean from stem to stern in half an hour.
Given television’s "Tiny House Nation" (a new program on FYI) and the many tiny house websites (I like tinyhousetalk.com), I’ve become something of an expert. So how do tiny houses differ from — let’s say — RVs?
Not only do tiny houses cost far less than RVs: they vary in style from arts-and-crafts-cottage to glass-and-maple modernism. RVs, judging from television programs devoted to them (like "Million-Dollar RV" or "Extreme RV"), are brown, black, and shiny gold inside: leather swivel-recliners, 42-inch flatscreens, and chrome-and-glass wet bars.
But tiny houses also run off the grid as much as possible: you’ll see composting toilets, propane tanks, recycled building materials, and solar panels. And tiny houses are sustainable in another sense. RVs are so technology based, they obsolesce as you drive them off the dealer’s lot. Tiny houses, like any house, can be updated incrementally.
Am I planning to move into a tiny house? Perhaps some day. Then why my current fascination with them? First, I love the geometry puzzle of designing and furnishing them. My 10-by-25-foot tiny house on wheels will have a sloping shed roof with clerestory windows under the high side and sliding glass doors opposite. I’ll build a sleeping-cum-storage loft for house guests above the bathroom and kitchen at one end, but the main living area at the other end will be open to the roof.
Downstairs, I’ll have a Murphy bed that unfolds over my sofa once I’ve removed the back cushions. I was considering a coffee table with storage that rises and expands to seat 6 for dinner, with folding chairs in a cupboard somewhere (see similar beds and tables at resourcefurniture.com). But I’ll probably choose an extension table between banquettes, under which I’ll have roll-out storage drawers.
I’ll definitely have a "wet room" with a vented skylight rather than a conventional bathroom. This means that the entire room is the shower stall because its floor (mine will be heated) has a central drain. The hand-held shower turns on at the sink, where it rests as a faucet when not attached to the wall.
As for the kitchen . . . well, that’s enough about my pie-in-the-sky tiny house. But I hope you see the fascination of planning them.
The second and greater fascination — for many people, I suspect — is the new life tiny houses promise, especially tiny houses on wheels. Anywhere you can park your tiny house, you can live. Spend August in Idaho, January in Miami. Visit the grandchildren while staying home. Move from college to grad school to internship without uprooting your cats. Turn your picture window north in summer; south in winter.
A new life is also promised by the extreme decluttering tiny houses demand. In the age of Kindle and iPod, bookshelves and CD-players must already seem extraneous to many people. But what would it be like to live with just 4 cups, 4 plates, 4 bowls, 4 T-shirts, 4 chairs, 4 pairs of shoes? Heaven, I suspect! "Have nothing in your houses," wrote William Morris, "that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." Perhaps, in tiny houses, Morris’s "or" could approach "and."
Tiny houses offer escape from life’s excess baggage in a more philosophical sense: a break with consumerism, stay-put-ism, conformism. And yet, though they promise more scope for individualism, and for life farther off the grid, I think tiny houses are also more community friendly.
Modular tiny houses, assembled inside factories, could provide steady construction jobs and disaster-relief housing. Tiny houses could form neighborhoods of market-rate and low-income homes. And they could easily be reconfigured as community centers, clinics, or daycare facilities.
Couldn’t tiny houses bring new life and affordability even to Princeton, New Jersey? Parked in driveways in our most affluent neighborhoods, tiny houses could encourage greater density. In already dense neighborhoods, they’d bring homeowners rental income (with the first year’s rent probably covering construction costs).
We Princetonians can be as forward-thinking and socially conscious as Berkeley, Austin, or Portland residents. Our zoning laws don’t permit RVs parked in driveways but only in garages. But what about tiny houses? How quickly can we reconcile our ordinances with our cultural values and accommodate these eco-friendly, people-friendly, neighborhood-friendly, brave new tiny worlds? How quickly can Princeton accommodate anything new and good?
Anne Waldron Neumann is author of "Should You Read Shakespeare?" and teaches creative writing in Princeton.
