‘If you do only one thing to make your new home more environmentally sound, make it small. Unless supporting the housing industry is the kind of sustainability you hope to achieve, a reasonably scaled home is the best way there is to make a positive difference with real estate.’
—Jay Shafer, The Small House Book
‘It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put my thumb up and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.’
—Neil Armstrong
Amanda Chapman strikes me as quite tiny herself, and she’s building a tiny house! Actually, a tiny house on wheels (THOW). Since old-school bloke-ish dismissiveness of the ‘You’re just a girl, do you really think you can build a house, love?’ variety is still a thing, I like the idea that this woman is no hulking giant physically, because, as we all know deep down, the only size that matters is the size of your dreams, and your determination to act on them.
Surely it also helps not to be an NBA player if you plan to live in a tin shed that’s 2.5 metres wide. Chapman disagrees. ‘It was designed for a couple,’ she says (there was a partner; they split), ‘but three people could live comfortably in there, with another bed on the second mezzanine.’1 The house will be 7.2 metres long and extend 4.25 off the ground, including the height of the trailer. I, with my only-child issues and third bedroom/home office, suspect it might be easier with just Chapman and her cat, but the easy life is not the aim here. What Chapman is seeking is a more sustainable future.
Another zero-waster, she too was inspired by Plastic Free July and blogged about it. Chapman is building a life that aligns with her values, and one that proves a point: that it can be done. We can downsize and be happier for it; we can live more lightly on the planet and break the cycle of greed that is pushing Nature to her limits. The THOW is Chapman’s practical solution. ‘I really want to live off-grid and be self-sufficient, and you can’t do that when you’re renting,’ she says. And at twenty-six she can’t afford, and doesn’t want, a mortgage.
For the past three-and-a-bit years, Chapman has lived in a share house in Onehunga, a suburb of New Zealand’s sprawling capital Auckland, where the average house costs nearly a million bucks. The wrecker’s ball has not yet won here, and as we drove in we passed rows of century-old weatherboard villas set in large gardens. Chapman’s THOW is parked in hers—her landlord is supportive.
Some of the old places have been done up, their timber decks and stained-glass windows restored. Others are shambolic, paint peeling, their many draughty bedrooms for rent at relatively reasonable sums. It’s been twenty years since the likes of Chapman and her friends could afford a place like this in Sydney. From the outside glancing in, New Zealand, with its population of just under five million, seems like somewhere the eco- and artistically minded should thrive, but Chapman is not impressed with her rental’s faded grandeur and generous proportions, despite space for a vegetable patch. She finds it cold in winter, and can’t see the point of a kitchen big enough to rollerskate in. ‘No one uses that,’ she says, leading us past an enormous drawing room, empty but for a geriatric TV set. Overhead, a fluorescent strip light buzzes. Large houses serve one of two obvious functions: they accommodate many, or they represent money.
Americans build the biggest houses in the world. The average new build there is 240 square metres. Australians and New Zealanders aren’t far behind, but a recent story in the New Zealand Herald suggests the trends are polarising: houses are either super-sized or getting smaller.
Humans have been living in small dwellings since they worked out how to build walls. No, longer: since they lived in caves. But the tiny-house movement is about people choosing to live in very small spaces, when bigger ones are available to them and/or the norm in their communities.
Modern tiny-house fans began to self-identify as such after the American architect Lester Walker published his 1987 book Tiny Tiny Houses: or How to Get Away from It All. He was inspired by seeing how astronauts managed in cramped conditions. ‘I’ve always felt, Why can’t we build smaller? … It’s so much more efficient, the taxes, the construction, the heat.’ What he calls ‘the McMansion movement’ spurred him to go searching for historic examples of compact cabins and cottages, and to encourage people to build new ones, but Walker is not keen on the THOW concept and has said, ‘I think it should be more of a little permanent number in your backyard or in the woods somewhere.’2 Walker’s tiny houses are just neat holiday homes.
Binge-watching US TV show Tiny House, Big Living, I’m struck further by the lack of focus on the eco element. The builders are mostly looking to reduce debt or declutter, or think tiny houses are adorable. Janet wants to downsize ‘for the challenge’. Ethan thinks THOWs look cool. Mark co-owns a cabinet company that makes posh wine cellars, so building a tiny house with one inside it seems like good marketing, plus he’s skint and sick of living with his parents.
In an essay for Curbed, a former editor at The New York Times Home section ponders possible motivations. ‘Is the building type popular because it is economical and sustainable, fostering noble values and family cooperation, or is it immature?’ Perhaps the tiny house is like an adult cubbyhouse? ‘Does the small scale allow efficient management of resources, or despotic control of one’s surroundings?’ And, ‘To what extent is simplicity really a virtue?’3
Thoreau fans certainly think it is. The simplifiers’ poster boy, Henry David Thoreau was an American writer who in 1845 built himself a cabin in the woods in order ‘to live deliberately’. Single-roomed, ‘ten feet wide by fifteen feet long’, it had space for a bed, chair, desk and stove, two windows, a wood shed out back and a cellar reached by a hatch in the floor. Thoreau chopped the pines to build it himself, plastered inside and shingled out. There, he wrote Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, his paean to the beauty and majesty of Nature and rejection of the distracting fuss of society. Thoreau believed that city life was ‘frittered away by detail’ and concluded, ‘A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.’ He took this to the nth degree. ‘A lady once offered me a mat,’ he wrote, ‘but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.’ For Thoreau, a house was a place to sleep and write. Real life was lived beyond four walls. He anticipated modern conservationists’ concerns, writing to a friend in 1860, ‘What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?’4
While Jay Shafer doesn’t advocate the full Walden hermit path, America’s most famous modern tiny-house influencer moves beyond aesthetics and convenience to explore the social and environmental benefits of this mode of living. His advice to would-be downsizers? ‘A good way to assess what you’re gonna miss is to just go camping for a week.’5 Shafer’s initial motivations were political. He built his first tiny house in 1997, partly as a response to legal restrictions on dwelling size that aim to keep vagrants from living in sheds. Why shouldn’t they? Shafer had happily lived in a caravan before. ‘A small house is not merely as good as its larger correlate, it is better,’ he writes in The Small House Book (even the name is simplified). ‘A home that is designed to meet its occupants’ domestic needs for contented living without exceeding those needs will invariably surpass the quality of a bigger one in terms of sustainability, economics and aesthetics.’
As Chapman knows, building a tiny house isn’t always as simple as the life you crave: zoning laws usually restrict new builds to those that meet square-metre requirements, hence the solution of putting these little dwellings on wheels, so that they can be technically classed as recreational vehicles. This approach comes with its own regulations. In Australia and New Zealand, nothing on the road can be wider than 2.5 metres—the reason for Chapman’s skinny abode. There are local laws that make it illegal to live full-time in an RV outside of designated zones, and that prohibit camping for an open-ended time on properties, even when they are your own. An ingenious lot, tiny-house fans are finding ways to work with all this.
An Auckland company has been building THOWs since 2016, designed for off-grid living, with solar panels and composting toilets—there’s even one to rent on Airbnb so you can try before you buy—but Chapman wanted to build her own.
The first step was internet research, and visiting other people’s little pads. She went WWOOFing (volunteering as a Willing Worker on Organic Farms) for a guy building a THOW, and took copious notes. ‘Then I literally drew myself a picture of how I wanted my house laid out,’ says Chapman. Her ex converted it into a CAD drawing. Chapman’s 83-year-old grandfather was a builder, and he’s been helping out, ‘although he’s never built with a steel frame before,’ she says.
Taking it slow means she can afford to learn on the job—she taught herself about plumbing via YouTube. She forked out for a new trailer, batteries and composting toilet, but otherwise most of her materials are factory seconds, used or free. She’s excited about a lightweight fibreglass bath tub she’s just found. ‘It fits!’ Ah, a bath of one’s own; she’s living the dream, which for Chapman, who has moved twenty-three times in as many years, is clearly rooted in her rootlessness as much as in her sustainability goals. Amanda Chapman wants to settle down.
‘Do you guys want some cake?’ she says. I put my hand out. ‘Full disclosure: it is dumpster-dive cake.’ Momentarily I take my hand back but can’t handle the bad manners, so I have my cake and eat it, and it’s delicious.