Potentially NSFW: tiny getaways from the big, bad wolf called life.

Clearly, we have an issue with downsizing, as in we can’t get enough of it. We acknowledge that minimizing, tiny-fying and compartmentalizing has its limitations (space being one of them), but the myriad incarnations and manifestations of the tiny house movement are boundless.

From modernist bunkers to treetops on high, tiny is popping up everywhere – most notably on sites like Tiny House Swoon and Tiny House Blog where we sourced a few of our itty bitty dream homes. Without further ado, twenty we could squeeze into right now.

UFO Tiny House…

Tiny house at the lake…

Tiny house on wheels…

Tiny Victorian…

Tiny double-decker cottage…

Tiny carport house…

Tumbleweed Tiny House…

Rustic tiny house…

Modernist tiny house…

Tiny bunker house…

Tiny piece of heaven house…

Tiny in Texas house…

Shacked up tiny house…

Floating tiny house…

Tiny house a-go-go…

Tiny tree house…

Tiny beach chalet…

Tiny creatively re-used house…

Grown up tiny house…

The “pretty please with sugar on top” tiny house.

Images: Toby Bradbury; Tiny House Swoon (3); Sharona Design; Apartment Therapy; Apartments Interior Design; Angry Unicorns; Tiny House Blog (4); The Stir; The Style Files; The Tiny Life; Tinyhousing.ca; Design Boom (3); Dwelle; Not Martha

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Small was sexy in 2011. 

The world’s population hit seven billion this year and is projected to reach nine billion by 2050 – a sure sign that we better start figuring out ways to maximize space. The average house size in America has more than doubled since the 1950s, forcing us to consume more utilities and resulting in a housing culture where bigger is better. We think just the opposite.

These Shelter posts from 2011 highlighted the small space trend and showed that less can definitely be more.

Not only are narrow homes more energy-efficient, they’re also genius and popping up in cities from London to Tokyo.

Artists, professionals, and sustainability activists like Graham Hill and Jay Shafer are turning extreme micro-living into an art, but can others follow suit?

When her partner starts building a 130-square-foot wooden cabin from scratch, Merete Mueller decides to document the process. The result is “TINY: A Story About Living Small,” a film exploring the couple’s turn to minimalism and the concept of small living across America.

Small living is one thing, but dumpster homes? Artist Gregory Kloehn debuted Elite Waste, a luxury urban home installation housed in a trash receptacle, at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in September.

Guests at the Tubohotel in Tepoztlan lodge in 6-by-9 foot concrete tubes set in an organic orchard. What they lack in entertainment and facilities, they make up in pure novelty.

Mirrors can instantly make a small abode appear larger. We loved these 12 eco-friendly ones.

If you’re ready to make the leap to little, you’ll need some innovative storage solutions. Try these.

SEE ALSO:

2011 in Review: The Most Offensive Ad Campaigns Of 2011

2011 In Review: The 10 Stories That Defined Shelter in 2011

The post 2011 in Review: How Small Spaces Trumped McMansions appeared first on EcoSalon.

A new film explores the lives of American families that have downsized to 400 square feet or less.

I sent my partner, Christopher, a text one frigid day last February asking a simple question: “What are you doing?”

Christopher replied he was “just working,” then, “Might go up to the mountains.”

When he finally told me what he’d really been up to – that he’d skipped work and called a mountain real estate agent on a whim, and put down an offer on a five-acre plot of land, I didn’t have to ask why or what he was planning to do next.

I knew what this land was slated for: a tiny 130-foot cabin in the mountains, built from scratch, with his own two hands. He’d been scheming and dreaming about it for years, and I matched his brainchild with one of my own.

“Great,” I said, “Let’s make a documentary film about it.”

The result is “TINY: A Story About Living Small.” It follows Christopher’s story of building his own tiny house from scratch with no construction experience and explores the lives of other families around America who have downsized their lives into less than 400 square feet.

As we’ve both grown into our “adult” lives, we’ve become more interested in sustainability both environmental and financial. Since 1970, the average house size in America has almost doubled. The result from this home growth means many things: we consume more resources, we use more energy for this new-found square footage, we spend more time maintaining it and consequently more money on mortgage payments.

As the skeleton of our own tiny walls rose up, we started to ask: Does all that extra space really make people feel at home? For our own sake we wondered, what is it that does make a home, a home?

I’ve come to realize that a home is made up in the small, strong details that give a building character, the way structures surrounding us shape our lives and our needs and ideas about what’s possible as we grow into them.

We live tiny and I get that 130-square-feet isn’t for everyone. Honestly I’m still trying to figure out whether it’s for me. But one thing’s for sure: minimal space inspires innovative design, and paring down possessions frees up time and money to devote to other, more expansive intellectual and aesthetic pursuits.

Whether or not the film convinces us all to go tiny, we’re capturing some heartfelt questions and creative ideas that can be applied to any lifestyle, no matter the square footage.

After all, Christopher’s house is as much about the kind of life that we want to build, as it is about the (tiny) house that will contain it.

Author Merete Mueller’s documentary is now a Kickstarter campaign. To contribute from now until December 15, visit their Kickstarter page. She’ll be sharing more adventures from her TINY life over the next month. 

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Dramatic downsizing is forcing us to consider a psychological shift.

I’ve lived in a New York City shoebox apartment, the kind where the bathroom is in the kitchen and the bed is above the refrigerator, literally. Back then, tiny was more of a price consideration than a conscious one. Nowadays, small is the new cool with professionals, artists, sustainability activists and Tiny House People vying for less (and less) space by choice. Consider it a backlash against the McMansion era, an unsustainable trend wherein vast swathes of suburban and exurban landscape were razed to erect prefab palaces for anyone with enough cash burning in their pocket, regardless of whether or not they could afford it.

Thanks to small space advocates like Treehugger’s Graham Hill, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company’s Jay Shafer, and George Jetson’s architect of record Nano Systems, this is the year of the smaller and vastly more environmentally considerate house that actually is affordable, in principal and derivative. But by constructing and modulating on as small a scale as possible, are we over-correcting?

Tumbleweed Tiny House Company’s “Weebee” model

Shafer’s Tiny House plans start as small as 65 square feet. That’s pretty tiny, though he’s living comparatively large in a 96-square foot home north of San Francisco in Sonoma County, an area known for particularly pricey homes.

Treehugger’s Hill crowd-sourced designers to optimize his low-footprint, 420 square foot SoHo living space, inclusive of a home office, space for two guests to stay over, dining area fit for a feast for 12, and a lounge space for eight.

The Cube Project

And now this, the 3x3x3m Cube Project. That’s the standard size of a backyard storage shed, a fairly major foray into the miniscule.

The innovative structure, a true shelter if ever there was one, is quite genius if you can wrap your head around the idea of leading with your left foot everywhere you turn. The house is meant to “generate at least as much energy as it uses,” and features solar panels, cork floors, LED lighting throughout, a composting toilet and an Ecodan air-source heat pump. It’s suitable for one lithe individual and includes a lounge, dining table and two custom-made chairs, a double bed, full-size shower, kitchen, microwave oven and a washing machine, too.

The Cube, which made its debut at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, certainly challenged onlookers to reevaluate what they thought they knew about compact, low-carbon living.

But it also makes one wonder: Is this level of extreme downsizing healthy on a purely psychological level? My Manhattan “studio” apartment of yesteryear nearly landed me in an altogether different bin. Dr. Mike Page, a Reader in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and creative force behind the project begs to differ. He believes that addressing climate change requires as much of a psychological shift as a technological one. “The Cube Project,” he says in his mission statement, “is an attempt to show that many of the technologies we need are already commonly available and at an affordable price. The question is why aren’t we using them?”

We’ve certainly seen the average size of the American home drop after 15 straight years of growth, a reasonable shift in the right direction. I suppose that because extreme micro-living, a concept that is leaps and bounds ahead of logical down/rightsizing, requires such a dramatic shift in our cultural paradigm that it can leave some of us feeling a bit claustrophobic. But such a shift is possible. Ask any Manhattanite.

Image: The Cube Project

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Stuff – we all have it. But sometimes, all of the miscellany of life can add up until it feels like a physical weight. After eight moves in eight years, I managed to accumulate a basement full of storage bins that I unquestioningly brought with me to every new home. I found myself buying more and more bins to fill with more and more stuff.

But eventually, all of this stuff became a burden. I began to see myself as a turtle with an obscenely oversized shell that threatened to topple over at any moment. An extra coffee maker, art supplies that I might use “someday”, an unused ironing board, a stereo gathering dust. It’s all too easy to fill a house with things that we use once in a blue moon, if ever – but it’s not so easy to get rid of it.

I didn’t have much choice – I’m downsizing my life dramatically, and all this stuff had to go. Today, half of my belongings are gone and let me tell you, it feels amazing. Here’s how I did it.

1. Make a list of the items you actually use at least once a month. These things are your core possessions, the things you need to live a comfortable and happy life.
2. As you assess each of the items you have left (and there will be many), ask yourself, “Does this contribute to my life in a meaningful way?” Do you love it or need it? Does it have real sentimental value or a legitimate function in your life, or is it just taking up space?
3. Create a “maybe” box and a “no” box. At first, your “maybe” box will be overflowing, but that’s okay. Later on, you’ll get a bit more brutal about deciding what stays and what goes.
4. Let go of your fears about the expectations of others. So Great Aunt Edna gave you a set of tacky gold angel figurines for your birthday five years go, and you think she’s going to be hurt if she doesn’t see it displayed in your home. You know what? Accepting a gift does not mean agreeing to hang on to it for a lifetime.
5. Don’t use stuff as an investment – it’s only worth what other people will pay for it, and you’re paying to store it. A neighbor of mine once had an entire room in his home devoted to Beanie Babies, which were hot sellers in the late ’90s. You know what they’re worth now? Nothing. Only keep stuff like this if it’s in pristine condition and you’re positive that it has collectible value, and in that case, get it appraised and insured. Otherwise, invest your cash and save precious storage space.
6. Analyze your wardrobe. Anything you haven’t worn in at least a year is a goner. If a color or print sticks out like a sore thumb, don’t keep on searching for something that will match. It’s much simpler to stick to a smaller wardrobe of high-quality essentials that can be mixed and matched.
7. Consider whether you will need to use each item at least once a year. Some things, like seasonal décor, make sense to keep – but others can be rented or borrowed on those rare occasions when they’re actually called into action. If you’re on the fence about an item that you feel might be useful at some mythical future date, think about giving it to someone who would get more use out of it.
8. On the other hand, don’t get rid of so much stuff that you’re forced to re-buy most of it within months. It’s easy for some people to get caught up in the spirit of de-cluttering, but you don’t want to merely re-enter the cycle of consumption and cost yourself more money in the long run.
9. Now, divide your cast-offs into four piles: sell, donate, recycle and toss. Your trash box should only contain things that have truly outlived their usefulness and can’t be recycled. Sell items that could fetch any cash on eBay, Craigslist or at a yard sale. Drop off whatever is left at your local charity drive, or find new homes for it at Freecycle.org.
10. Learn from this experience. After witnessing the pitiful pennies that many of my like-new possessions brought in at my yard sale, I now think twice about every new purchase. If you don’t truly need it, it’s a waste of money.

Image: MelvinSchlubman

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