HAVING ONCE OWNED A HOME, NATALIE POLLARD (FORVILLAGERS.COM) KNEW THAT WHEN she moved to Asheville, NC, buying a house didn’t appeal to her at all. “The weight and responsibility of owning a home,” she says, was too much. Renting, however, had left her searching for a better option. Finally she spoke with a friend who asked, “When were you the happiest? What living situation left you feeling the best?” Natalie spent some time reflecting seriously on the question and came to realize “the point I was really happy in my life was when I lived in really tiny spaces. I made the correlation that less space meant more money, more time, and more freedom.” That realization solidified her plans, giving her a direction to move forward. She would live tiny.
She spent time planning her move to a new home, initially thinking about building a yurt. One day, though, she found herself talking with some friends who happened to be builders. Their company is called Nanostead, and they have built small homes for years. Now, though, they wanted to build a tiny house. Natalie offered to be their first client; the perfect option seemed “to just fall into my lap,” Natalie says.
Natalie was excited to see her home take shape. The fact that it was built by friends made it feel as if “it had a special quality to it, like a handmade gift.” Because the home was being built for her, she had to make a number of decisions when it came to the finishing and design elements.
Photograph by Tamara Gavin
Photograph by Max Cooper Photography
The house used a lot of reclaimed elements in it, and where the components weren’t reclaimed, the builders opted for locally sourced materials. The house was framed, sheathed, and sided with lumber milled by a local family-owned lumber mill. Several accent walls are sided with reclaimed materials from an old cabin built during the Civil War; the cabin had been deconstructed and milled into planks.
Natalie’s flooring was from a local salvage store, which captures lumber from construction sites and resells it so it doesn’t enter the waste stream. Her counters, storage, and cabinets were all bought at thrift and antique stores and then combined into the various components of her kitchen and storage spaces.
Throughout her house she loved using reclaimed and repurposed materials because many of them had a closeness to her. Some things came from friends and family, adding a sentimental dimension to the elements of her house. Natalie says for those things that came from people she knew she likes “the embodied energy from the materials that comes from time.” Some items came from her own store, Villagers, in Asheville, NC (http://forvillagers.com).
The final house was exactly what Natalie was looking for. Moving into her home was an adjustment, but she notes that “a well-designed space made it easy.” Her new life meant that she was “afforded so much freedom and had so little stress” that she couldn’t imagine living any other way.
Photograph by Tamara Gavin