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| <back | home Little House – A Book for a New Movement by Shay Solomon Americans have quickly become the most housed people in the history of humanity. Between 1950 and 2004, while family size and time spent at home shrank, average new house size more than doubled to about 2400 sq. ft., granting new home residents over 900 sq. ft. per capita. Most of us have noticed the trend: new subdivisions filled with McMansions pumped up on steroids, neighbors who demolished their cottage and replaced it with a mini-castle, the friend of a friend’s childless brother who just added on a third bedroom. Many of us know someone who has suffered the consequences of an inflated mortgage, an unmanageable construction project, or a house simply too large to keep clean. Will our dream home always be a celebration of excess, and a drain on our lives? Is it, as George H.W. Bush said in 1992, of the American way of life, “Not up for negotiation?” I wrote Little House because, working in the building industry, I saw how people’s lives are torn apart by oversized projects. I learned about the waste that construction causes: the wilderness razed, the landfill stretched. Like many people, I saw that excessive housing is not leading to excessive happiness. And I ‘ve noticed that some wise people buck the trend. They build, remodel, redecorate, or just re-think their needs, prudently and calmly, constructing a joyful, sane life around themselves. They think, sometimes literally, outside the box, and they think close, warm, and simple, applying spiritual and social solutions to their material desires. I want to bring the wisdom of their success to a wider audience. As we traveled across the country interviewing and photographing people and houses for Little House, we began to understand the breadth and depth of the small house movement. Over the past few years, we traveled to over eighty locations in 24 states and four Canadian provinces. In the course of our work, residents of every US state and several European countries have contacted us to share their experiences. Pockets of people all over the continent are realizing the benefits of scaling down. They are designing a new dream, one that re-unites extended families, makes space for friends, and emphasizes home life over home maintenance. They are making this change just in time to meet the newest challenge of the building industry: the sharply rising cost of construction materials and building permit fees. Little House is a guidebook to this movement, and an invitation to join. Drawn from my own experience and from the people we interviewed, it offers fourteen basic principles for the design and habitation of efficient, high-density homes. Each principle corresponds to one aspect of building, remodeling, or simply living more comfortably in less space. The principles address the homes themselves, as well as the surrounding area, and expand beyond the physical to the nature of relationships and the care of the self within a snug space. These fourteen principles outline the invisible supports of a happy home, set within the context of the creation of a caring society. Profiles of homes and their inhabitants comprise over a third of the book, offering successful examples from the small house movement: sprawling suburban ranch homes converted into comfortable duplexes, couples who fell back in love after selling their big-mortgage house and resettling into modesty; professionals who gave up the harried life and retired early to remote cabins; legislation in California and other states that encourages the creation and rental of backyard cottages; why staying put in a New York City apartment is generally more ecologically reasonable than moving out West; and why the very-American phenomenon, travel trailers, can be surprisingly efficient. Little House comes out of the tradition of books that have helped us rethink our eating, work, spending and cluttering habits. It adds the spatial dimension. With floor plans, photographs, advice and anecdotes, Little House asks and answers, ‘What fills a home when the excess is cut away?’ and ‘How do we get there from here?’ <back | top^ |