I told my sister Sharon that when she retired from teaching I would build her a house here on our small farm in the foothills of the Sierras. The design went through many rough drafts before we arrived at one that met all our criteria.
The house had to be beautiful, a home that would be a joy to live in. It needed to be small, to fit her budget and to comply with our county building ordinance concerning secondary residences: no more than 1200 square feet. The design of the house had to compliment the main house, a two-story, farm-style dwelling. And the new house had to minimize any deleterious affects upon the environment, both in the building and in its continued use.
–Michael Easterling
This is Sneak Preview #16 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Brad Lancaster lives in a cottage (converted garage) on a piece of land in Tucson, Arizona. He harvests rainwater and has a grid-tied photovoltaic system. The house and grounds are carefully designed and built to maximize natural temperature regulation and to conserve water for growing. We’re doing four pages on this setup.
The public right-of-way adjoining property in 2015. All vegetation is irrigated solely by passively harvested rainfall and street runoff. All perennial plantings selected for their food, medicine, and wildlife habitat-producing characteristics.
–Brad Lancaster
This is Sneak Preview #15 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Lobelia is the name of our 864-square-foot two-bedroom straw bale home. Named after a native wildflower, Lobelia was built with many reclaimed materials, including all framing lumber, most doors and windows, and even the kitchen cabinet.
The straw bale exterior walls are protected by earthen plaster inside and out. Outside, the hip roof and wood shingle skirt, made from pallet wood scraps, along with a coat or two of raw linseed oil, help protect the exterior plaster from the elements.
–Alyssa Martin and Tony (AKA Papa Bear) Barrett
This is Sneak Preview #14 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Master builder Vin Jon Gorman’s colorful, exquisitely crafted small home in progress. (See pp. 204–205, Builders of the Pacific Coast for his eucalyptus pod–shaped redwood sauna).
This is Sneak Preview #13 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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The house was designed to be very maintenance-free, using durable materials. It has a metal roof, 22-gauge corrugated Corten steel siding, concrete floors and 8″ wide oak plank floors upstairs.
4 × 12 Douglas fir beams were salvaged from the Seattle Federal Building for the stair treads. I used simple inexpensive materials for much of the build to save money, but the house has zero particle board. I wanted the materials in the house to be identifiable, real materials.
I believe that beauty is the highest order of sustainability. Whatever you put into this world, make it beautiful.
–Mike Buckley
This is Sneak Preview #12 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Kitchen in Guner Tautrim’s wooden home on California coast
Interior woods were all milled on site and include a floor of black walnut, kitchen cabinets of silky oak and black acacia, wainscoting of red gum eucalyptus, red ironbark eucalyptus, and yellow acacia; as well as kitchen counters made from large slabs of swamp eucalyptus…
This is Sneak Preview #11 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Small roundhouse guest cottage built by Tony Wrench in West Wales, UK
This is Sneak Preview #10 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Our house consists of a living room/kitchen, bedroom, and a bathroom. My husband Rob and I have lived here since July 2013…
Our cottage sits on just over six acres of land, partly forested, and rocky throughout. A 75′ × 55′ man-made pond is an “off-shoot” of the stream that borders the property…
Certainly we’ve made lifestyle adjustments, but we love “living small” and have found that almost everyone that visits says they would love to “live small” too!
Floor Area: 480 sq. ft. / 45 m2
This is Sneak Preview #9 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Mike Basich, our star builder in Tiny Homes, is building a small home in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Photo of it under construction.
This is Sneak Preview #8 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in October, 2016.
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Bill and Athena Steen, the straw bale/earthen plaster maestro/maestra team from Arizona are helping build this home, which will be featured in our new book, Small Homes.
Bill writes: “Interior adobe wall in a clay-plastered straw bale house we are helping our boys build in Sonoita, AZ.”
(Bill shoots pretty much all his photos with an iPhone — has been doing it for a few years. I’ve finally come around to doing this. Both of us still use the big cameras (him a Nikon, me an Olympus OM-D) for serious shoots, but the iPhone for everyday shots. The new iPhone 6s Plus has a super new camera.)
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A dome made of cob, earth bags, light straw clay, and adobe in the high desert of Southern California.
This is Sneak Preview #7 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in October, 2016.
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My name is Erin, and I live on this boat, Jenny, outside Bristol in Southwest England. I am a printmaker and relocated here about a year ago. The boat is about 6 feet wide by 42 feet long, around 300 square feet of interior space. There is a real sense of community in houseboat living; we all look out for each other.
–Erin MacAirt
This is Sneak Preview #6 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in October, 2016.
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The Whole Earth Catalog was a revelation to us in the ’70s. Then we (my wife, her brother and sister and I) were twenty-somethings sharing a family camp on a remote lake in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
With our kids and their families, we’ve torn the place apart and rebuilt it. We talked, Keith Huff, a retired carpenter friend into doing the framing and roofing, and we’ve paid for some other services that were beyond us. But a lot of what’s happened has been our sweat equity.
–Jim Leach
This is Sneak Preview #4 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in October, 2016.
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We are in production of our next book, Small Homes, and we will be posting sneak previews as we continue doing layout — over the next several months.
My name is Suzy, and I’d like to tell you about my small house. It’s a little 1943 ranch-style farmhouse, 1082 sq. ft., and sits on 10 lovely acres just outside historic Madison, GA.
When we began to search for our first home, we considered lots of options. We had to choose between either a “desirable” neighborhood, or acreage in a more rural setting.
We’d been in Atlanta for a year and it was way too busy for us, so we began looking around outside the city. All the houses we looked at just didn’t work for us. Either they were small lots with large odd-shaped homes (’80s weirdness), or trailers on large plots of land.
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