Move over McMansions
When Scott McGlasson, a St. Paul, Minn., furniture designer, bought land for a vacation house on Little Pequaywan Lake, he knew he didn't want to build a large, traditional house like many of those he had seen going up in the region. "There are a lot of people building McMansions on lakes, but I really like small, simple things. And as a designer, I'm steeped in modernism — I love things that don't have unnecessary elements to them," he says.
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[FONT size=1]Top to bottom: Construction and transportation of a weeHouse, and the finished product.[/FONT][/TD][/TR][/TBODY][/TABLE]He designed the home with the help of his friend Geoff Warner, principal architect at Alchemy Architects, a St. Paul firm. The 800 square-foot dwelling, which cost around $160,000, was the second of Mr. Warner's "weeHouses," multipurpose units that can be used as anything from second homes to yoga studios. Mr. Warner says that the first one he built drew such a positive response that he decided to build more of the tiny houses — since 2003, he has sold 14 additional units.
Mr. Warner is one of a number of U.S. architects designing microhomes — typically, houses spanning from a few hundred to a little more than a thousand square feet. These houses, far smaller than the average 2,400 square-foot home built in the U.S. last year, contain most of the amenities of larger dwellings, including kitchens and bathrooms. Many occupy just two rooms, or sometimes two rooms plus a living area. Some microhomes compensate for the small layout by capitalizing on vertical space, custom-designing cabinets and furniture, raising ceilings to build in sleeping lofts, or even using flat-roof space as a deck or patio area.
Designers say microhome buyers tend to fall into one of two groups: The majority are looking for a secondary space, either a vacation home or a building near or attached to a primary residence. A minority of buyers are hoping to move into a minihouse full-time, motivated by a desire to simplify their lifestyles or by social and environmental concerns about the amount of living space people need.
While the market for tiny houses is still tiny itself, architects say they have seen interest from buyers jump significantly in the past five years. In 2002, Greg Johnson, an information-technology consultant in Iowa City, co-founded the Small House Society, a group that champions extra-small homes. He says he initially sent his newsletter to seven people; today he has about 260 individuals and architectural firms on the list.
Design Challenge
For architects who are weary of designing large-scale or cookie-cutter houses, building a minihome offers the challenge of figuring out how to make every nook and cranny count. Rocio Romero, who heads an architectural firm in Perryville, Missouri, says she finds it rewarding to make every space purposeful. A recent design for a 625-square-foot guest house uses a loft sleeping area and built-in beds to create more room below. She added windows in the loft and alcoves at the head of each bed with recessed lighting fixtures to facilitate reading in bed.
Since 2003, Ms. Romero has sold 45 microhomes around the U.S., using a design modeled after a vacation home that the architect built for her parents in Laguna Verde, Chile, a beach town along the country's central coast. Marion Anderson, a sculptor, bought one of the units to install next to her existing home in South Haven, Mich., as an art studio. The 1,250-square-foot dwelling, which includes the studio space and a bathroom, cost about $110,000, including assembly. "I have always been in love with Mies Van Der Rohe's house in Plano, Texas," Ms. Anderson says. "As I told Rocio one time, I feel like I've got a poor man's Mies."
Microhomes often rely on artful space-enhancing designs. Still, the houses can only hold so much. A year ago, Libby Crawley, the associate director of the doctoral program in business at Georgia State University, felt that her five-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath home in the suburbs of Atlanta was too sprawling and put needless strain on the environment. She decided to move into a one-bedroom house just under 700 square feet, in Atlanta's East Lake neighborhood. The house was once the garage of the house next door. She says that editing her possessions made her realize which ones she valued. "I stored some furniture that belonged to my grandmother," she says. "I kept my books. I left the washer and dryer and a side-by-side fridge." Right now she relies on a Laundromat, but says she might buy a small washing machine.
Other microhome buyers describe similar experiences of thriving on less. Tiffany Larsen, a graphic designer in Seattle, enjoys home-improvement projects to optimize her 650-square-foot space, from tiling to building closets. "I'm obsessed with trying to make it the most functional space possible," she says. She says the only thing she misses having is a dishwasher.
Many of today's mini dwellings, including Ms. Romero's compact homes and the weeHouses, are designed to be easy-to-assemble structures that are linked to a renewed interest in modernist, prefabricated homes. Today's prefabricated homes are delivered either in parts, as nearly finished units, or somewhere in between. Earlier modernist prefab designs, such as the General Panel Corp. system, designed by Walter Gropius in the early 1940s, eventually lost their appeal -- in part because their similarity made them difficult to market, says Witold Rybczynski, a professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design, and an author of 11 books on architecture and planning. "People wanted something more idiosyncratic," he says.
Today's designers have had more success by marketing the houses as multipurpose units. V2World, a Phoenix, Ariz., builder of minihouses, for example, pitches its units as "hotel, guesthouse, yoga room, urban dwelling, vacation pad, personal sanctuary, live-work space" -- whatever the owner wants them to be.
Architects and buyers say two of their biggest challenges they face with tiny houses are creating enough storage space and finding furniture small enough to be squeezed into compact rooms. Sleeping lofts, raised beds and underbed storage are staples. V2World uses small European appliances, including a Miele 24-inch convection oven and combination washer-dryer units, in its 450-square-foot, one-room units. In-house designers at V2World build cabinets to fit the units. Large windows make a little house seem less boxy.
Unique Look
Some homebuyers who live most of the time in standard-size houses like the idea of having a more unusual property for their vacation home. "The same people who are very conservative with their main house are prepared to be quite different [with a vacation house]," Mr. Rybczynski says. "People like A-frames, log cabins, geodesic domes."
Architect Jim Higgins bought one of Ms. Romero's LV units to use as a vacation home for himself and his partner in Eliot, Maine. While their primary home in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood is very traditional, the modern design of Ms. Romero's houses appealed to them for a secondary residence. "When we go to the Eliot house, it's like fun town," he says. The home's uniqueness makes him feel even more removed from ordinary life during his time off, Mr. Higgins says.
Installing a scaled-down, fully equipped minihouse next to a larger home also has gained currency in the past few years. Tom Stevens, a builder for Consortium Design Group in Canton, Mich., sells extra-small houses he calls "personal spaces." Ranging between a mere 64 square feet to just over 1,200, the microhomes have cathedral ceilings and hardwood floors.
For the past two years, Mr. Stevens has been working on a house on Batteese Lake, Mich., with a 288-square-foot flat-roof unit beside it. The smaller unit will incorporate the same materials as the house, and will have heating and a bathroom. It costs about $35,000 to build and "will look like a chip off the old block," Mr. Stevens says.
Living in a tiny home, as opposed to doing yoga in it or using it for vacations, often appeals to people who want simpler lives that leave less of an ecological "footprint." Small houses require less fuel for heating and cooling, fewer building resources and are much easier to clean. V2World Chief Executive Tim Russell says his company designed their houses on the premise that people in the U.S. eventually might have to move to smaller spaces due to demographic pressures and land exhaustion. "That puts good design at a premium," Mr. Russell says.
In fact, many of these microhome designs look quite edgy. Mr. Higgins says his modernist Maine vacation home sits on a little street amid a string of quaint New England colonial houses, and so it stands out. It has attracted a lot of attention from the neighbors, he says, who have told the architect they like the way the house looks, even if it doesn't quite fit in. "The metal on the outside reflects a blue sky," Mr. Higgins says. "It's so different from the other houses, and it's great to be in a different kind of space."
