Small House Style

Shay Salomon’s Little House on a Small Planet is not a book about little house design, as I originally thought; it’s a book about everything you should think about before you design and build. Or — if you already own a house — it’s a way to rethink space, and ultimately decide what you want in a “dream house” and what you can compromise in order to live there.

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Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan’s Apartment Therapy’s Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces got me excited—not only about designing the tiny house that I will build—but also about organizing and decorating apartment that I’m living in right now. Gillingham-Ryan’s optimism about being able to find an affordable, practical, and beautiful solution to any design challenge was contagious. I couldn’t resist getting off the couch twice while reading the book and making immediate changes to my apartment. Both design revisions cost me $0.00, by the way.

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When I think of a mini house, a scaled-down farmhouse with a garden and big back yard comes to mind; however in Alejandro Bahamón’s Mini House
the locations and styles vary from a metal-sided house in a crowded Japanese neighborhood, to a windowed wedge perched in the snowy Swiss Alps.

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The New York Times just ran a feature on singer and songwriter Kenny White who lives in 600 square feet with 20-foot-plus peaked ceilings on Bedford Street (just around the corner from Christopher Street) in Greenwich Village. The building, named Twin Peaks, was converted from a 19th-century row house into artists’ studios in 1926, and christened by the silent film star Mabel Normand, who broke a bottle of Champagne on the roof.

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