Size Matters

Book Review: Little House on a Small Planet

A few years ago, my husband and I went house-hunting as prices spiraled upward. We sought an affordable, well-built 2,400 sq.ft. contemporary home. We settled for a 1,400 sq.ft. 1950s rambler. Furnishing and maintaining that led to an epiphany: 400 sq.ft. is all we need, and want.

2,400 to 1,400 to 400 – it took a lot of time, effort and money to learn this lesson. Now there’s a short-cut to small-home smarts: Shay Salomon’s book, “Little House on a Small Planet.”

“People really are moved by this movement,” says Salomon, who in an email admits to getting fan mail each week.

Between the book’s covers, you’ll find function-driven inspiration to build all the house that fits your lifestyle, with no excess space to clean, maintain or serve as a clutter magnet. Or a drag – current research shows that our immediate environment impacts not only our efficiency but also mood and outlook. Excess, long a symbol of success, has a downside. How often have you heard laments about stuffed closets and drawers, cluttered rooms, the frustration of having too much of everything except time to enjoy it?

Perhaps you learned early on the real estate rule of thumb: Buy as much as you can afford. And that has become too much in this age of easy credit.

Salomon offers a new real estate rule for the real world: Build a glove, not a warehouse. A dwelling that fits and fulfills you, not someone else’s idea of a dream home in our consumption-driven society.

How much space does it take to be happy?

The author, a self-described “natural builder,”broadens the definition of eco-friendly housing beyond using sustainable, nontoxic materials to size. She has extracted 14 principles of building small from interviews with a few hundred folks with downsized dwellings.

These escapees from overbuilt environments offer antidotes to house lust and alternatives to McMansionization. You can say no to renovated palaces built of plastic credit cards, though often, zoning laws and building codes pose roadblocks.

Profiles of several actual small houses include locations, building cost, size, monthly utilities, and favorite aspects of the house. Among topics and ideas addressed in the book:

* Size matters: House size affects energy consumption more than insulation does – meaning your costs rise with cubic feet.

* How to downsize tips: Examples: Write the numbers 1 to 100 and tag 100 things to give away.
Note the time spent in each room of your current house to plan just what you really need. Remember that money saved in downscaling house plans can be used for eco-efficient and aesthetically pleasing luxuries.

* Not living large: Keep in mind the maxim that “stuff” expands to fill available space. Such is the magic of materialism. Interesting statistic: The self-storage industry has increased 40-fold since 1960, making it larger than the music business and more profitable than the film industry.

Tips: Choose and design for a set amount of storage space and simply allow no more. Design for shared space for different activities – such as a big central table for dining, socializing, work and school projects in an area having the best light, view and proximity to things you need.

* Cool kitchen idea: A cold storage box recessed into a thick wall that harnesses free cool night air and cold stored in the wall’s thermal mass to keep food chilled. A simple screen on the exterior keeps the animals out.

* Create spaciousness with a design that blurs the line between indoor and outdoor space, with nature providing some of the decor.

* Sick building syndrome resulting from the largely 1970s-80s energy efficiency-motivated sealing up of buildings. The book explains where to place operable clerestory windows and skylights to harness the best ventilation, working in consort with the physics of hot air rising. Outdoor kitchens merit discussion for their energy efficiency potential. Then there’s an example of permaculture at work, complete with chickens free-ranging as a “chicken tractor” plowing sections of a Point Reyes, Ca. garden.

* Living with children in a small home: The author addresses controversial questions such as “Is TV a human right?” and the “delicate dance of need and greed.” Consider the effects of modern living arrangements in which family members hole up in their own personal Siberias, shielded from exchanging ideas with one another thanks to their separate computers, PDAs, TVs ... the iPodification of daily life.

* Fortifying resolve against consumerism: To shake free of the tentacles of marketing messages, some have joined “simplicity circles.” Most of us have been co-opted by industry to reinforce messages to consume what benefits big business. We become wallet-waving zombies chanting cheese is healthy, unprocessed foods are undesirable, and bigger is better.

* Intelligent retrofitting and remodeling comprises a second section. Topics meander to gentrification’s environmental degradation of to trailer salvages to the deconstruction cottage industry that dismantles houses to move, rebuild and supply recycled materials for new projects. The book makes detours into co-housing and work-at-home territory, flex multi-generational residences, “Co Abodes” shared by single moms and other ways to maximize efficiency of one’s personal built environment.

* Quick quip: The addition, said Andy Rooney, is America’s contribution to the history of architecture.

* Sophisti-crit: The book’s utopian photo trove of hippie-dippy accented abodes may kick close-quarters up to a claustrophobic level for some recovering space addicts. Then again, there’s upside in having everything at your fingertips. But the principles translate to environs with cosmopolitan appeal. One can swap the fabric curtain dividers with sleek pocket doors, for example.

* Cutting-edge designs based on ancient but enduring building proto-technology: Such as Earthships built into hillsides in the Southwest, with walls bolstered by dirt-packed tires. The author touches on the government red-tape roadblocks erected by bureaucrats – some possibly propped up by big-business interests – via zoning and building codes.

* Big picture insights: Census reports indicate that in 2000, 10.4 million units of housing in the U.S. were vacant, while 250,000 people slept in homeless shelters. That’s 45 vacant houses per shelter occupant. Overseas, as Chinese emulate Western consumer culture, the panda is scrambling for shrinking space as houses grow larger and more plentiful.

* Practical philosophy: Bound by abundance – having so much has led to a different kind of scarcity. One sage commenting in the book noted how if we were to eat directly the 16 pounds of grain that it takes to produce a pound of meat, we would have 8 times as much protein available to us. Then there’s the increasing water scarcity issue.

Small houses, to most Americans, sounds like a revolutionary notion. But considering the revered architects who now hold forth on the environmental as well as aesthetic and social benefits of hewing to “human scale” design, architecture and urban planning, it’s a idea that fits like a glove.

Resources:

“Little House on a Small Planet” by Shay Salomon (The Lyons Press)

www.littlehouseonasmallplanet.com

www.smallhousesociety.org