Want a small self-build project? Try a teeny tiny house from Tumbleweed. With designs ranging from 65 sq ft, all the way up to 837 sq ft, these houses are pretty dinky, the largest being only a bit bigger than our current flat (about 600 sq ft).
You can buy the teeny houses ready-made (if you’re in the US, at least), or you can buy the plans for both teeny and tiny designs, and do it yourself.
The nice thing about about designing one’s own home is that you can build it to fit around the way you like to live, rather than have to change your habits to fit your new house. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, particularly in relationship to the way that Kevin and I work. I work from home, so some sort of home office is going to be necessary, but I don’t want that office to be tucked away somewhere at the top of the house. Not only would I feel isolated, but I’d have a great big trek to the kitchen and loo too. Equally, I don’t want it to be right near the lounge, because the mess from the office will just track its way into the living space and mess that up too.
In thinking about where to put the office, I was reminded of how important it is to have rituals around the beginning and end of your day when you work from home. I’ve spoken about this at conferences before, and I believe that creating a space that enables me to have an opening and closing ritual to bookend my working day would really help me get going in the morning and switch off at night. Some people go for a walk around the block (with or without dog) to simulate the sense of “going to work”. Shedworkers obviously leave their house to walk to their shed, which gives them a leaving and returning ritual to observe. For me, the closest I get right now is saying goodbye to Kevin at the beginning of the day, and saying hello to him when he returns, which makes for a very long day when he has after-work drinkies.
I haven’t entirely solved the office/work ritual problem yet and would love to hear if anyone has any ideas or experiences trying to build in work-related rituals to their house/home office environment.
But the rituals don’t stop there. Kevin and I have other habits that have acquired almost mystical meaning in the time we’ve been together. We often read to each other before we go to sleep, so our bedroom furniture and lighting will be designed with that in mind. (Our current bed is deeply uncomfortable to sit in, for example, because of its metal bar head “board”.) We cook together, so an open plan kitchen is a must*. And like everyone, we have our grooming rituals, which really would be easier if we had a bigger bathroom.
But one key ritual that Kevin really enjoys is his morning coffee. First there’s the grinding of the beans, by hand in a German coffee grinder. Then they go in his Bialetti, which goes on the stove whilst he heats some milk. When the coffee’s done it goes in his mug with the frothed milk on top. I don’t drink coffee, so this is really Kev’s thing, but it’s something that he really enjoys. It’s not just the taste of the coffee, it’s the whole procedure. So how would one work that into kitchen design? A key element would be to have a composting bin for his coffee grounds, as apparently they’re good for the garden. But is it just a space dedicated to his coffee paraphernalia and preparation that he needs, or could there be more to it than that?
I’m sure I’ll come up with other little habits and rituals that we engage in, and it’s going to be a challenge just to remember them all, let along figure out how to incorporate them, when we come to designing the house. Mind you, the way things are going, we’re going to have a long time to gather and perfect our ideas.
* One without computers in, however…
Whenever I travel, I always try to make sure there’s time to pop into a newsagent before I get on the plane, train or coach. For some reason, travel interchange newsagents normally carry a good selection of self-build magazines, so I can usually pick up some light reading for the journey. Last week, Kevin and I went to Prague for a conference – a great opportunity to read August’s issue of Homebuilding & Renovating.
Together we leafed through, point out things we liked and things we found hideous to each other. Eventually, we reached page 42 and the beautiful Border Oak house that Stephen and Elizabeth Roberts built in Pembridge, Herefordshire, which is “well known for its heavily timbered mediaeval ‘black and white’ houses”.
I think you’ll agree that it’s a beautiful house, quintessentially English, and full of character.
The Roberts said that they saw an article in H&R about a Border Oak house and immediately wanted one. They ordered a three bedroom cottage, with “brick and block ground floor, an oak framed first floor and reclaimed clay roof tiles which give the building an authentic aged appearance.” It’s one-and-a-half storeys high, with dormer windows, which give sloping ceilings in the bedrooms.
H&R says:
Laying underfloor heating throughout the building avoided the need for awkward radiators, which Elizabeth and Stephen felt would spoil the authenticity of the interiors, and also greatly pleased the couple’s pet tortoise, Darwin, who adores the warm floors.
I can imagine that underfloor heating, which I definitely want, will please our FutureMoggies too!
The ground floor has flagstones and the first floor has oak floorboards. They have a brick inglenook fireplace in the lounge, with an oak lintel, woodburning stove, and flagstone hearth. The kitchen is gorgeous, with oiled hardword work surfaces and all modern appliances hidden from view.
I have to say that Kevin and I both love this style of house – it’s so warm, friendly and inviting. If we end up building in a British village, then I will definitely look at this as an option. I expressed concern to Kev that if we move to the US, this wouldn’t exactly fit the local vernacular, to which he replied that the nice thing about the US is that you can ignore the local vernacular and do whatever the hell you like!
And if you want a bit of oak-frame porn, you can do no better than visiting the Border Oak website – click on ‘portfolio’ and knock yourself out. There are some beautiful houses there to really get the juices flowing.
Ah, one day.
Whilst Kevin and I were in the US a few weeks ago, I became rather obsessed with the houses that we saw as we drove around. It was my second trip to Poplar Grove, Illinois, so I was curious to see how much the development that I saw last September had moved on. The results of the credit crunch were very evident: half-finished houses that looked like they were never going to be completed; finished homes standing empty; land marked out for foundations but remaining unbroken.
But whilst this was interesting, I was more curious about my own reactions to the houses we saw. Many of them left me cold – they were soulless, heartless, cookie-cutter developments with all the personality of, well, a brick. From the road, all we could see was the backs of the houses, which featured small windows, uniform cladding and a roof that looked like it had been made using the Photoshop ‘clone’ tool. Deeply unattractive.
When you drove into these housing estates, or ’subdivisions’ as they call them in the US, you could see that a little bit more effort had gone into making the front look attractive, usually through the use of false shutters, but the sides and back of the houses were extremely plain.
In this house, you can see that the central front windows have false shutters, but all the lesser windows are don’t. The backs of these houses were even worse – they looked just like giant shipping containers. This example also shows one of the other design tricks that American mass housing developers use to try and create an ‘interesting’ look: cutting up the roofline as much as possible. Personally, I think this is hideously messy and entirely unappealing.
Here’s another example of a house with a rather overdone roof featuring dormers and gables aplenty:
It’s got soulless windows too, and I think that the almost wrap-around porch is out of proportion and does nothing to enhance the look of the house.
Now, I’m not a design expert, so I spent a lot of time wondering why I hated these houses so much, trying to put my finger on what it was that made them so unappealing. Whilst I can generally articulate why I dislike houses in the UK, it was harder to figure out the problems in the US because the style of building over there is very different. I started taking photos, but a lot of the worst offenders were seen at a distance from a moving car. Here are a couple more examples for you:
Don’t be surprised by the size of these houses – they were a part of a subdivision attached to a small airport. The bit that looks like an oversized garage is, in fact, a light aircraft hanger. Nevertheless, this does highlight another ugly trend I noticed, which is the prominence given to the garage. Many of the normal houses I saw put their garages front and centre, giving them more prominence than even the front door. Ignore the size of this house, and just look at the placement of the garage compared to the front door:
I mean, I know that some people love their car, but is your garage really the most important part of your house?
Contrast this to some of the older houses the US has produced, which are truly lovely. This is the Baldpate Inn just outside of Estes Park, Colorado:
A house in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin:
And a farmhouse near Kev’s parents’ place, which possibly goes a bit far with the rearing stallion, but its simplicity proves that you don’t need to be big and flash to be nice:
So, what are the key things that I don’t like about the mass produced houses?
It was definitely an educational trip in which I learnt a lot about what I do and don’t like. I also realised that I don’t need to go so far to learn about housing design. America has a lot of land, a lot of people, and a lot of opportunity to create awful housing development that suck the joy out of life by their very existence. The UK may have less land and fewer people, but by George we’ve produced some genuinely awful houses, particularly during post-War reconstruction. Modernism has a lot to answer for.
But I also learnt that I don’t need to focus my learning on books and magazines – there are plenty of examples I can look at just outside my front door. After all, I’m not trying to become an architect, I’m trying to figure out what I want and like in a house.
Kev and I went over to Illinois a few weeks ago for our American wedding reception – a party at his parents’ house. The weather was pretty atrocious. A stationary front sat across middle America, spewing out violent thunderstorms and tornados. We missed one tornado by 12 miles, and there were Tornado Watches (be aware) and Tornado Warnings (be prepared to take action) many of the days we were there.
I will confess, it made me a bit nervous. Thunderstorms I don’t mind, but the idea of tornados scares the bejeezus out of me, mainly because I simply don’t know what the signs are that you have to go and hide in the basement. If you’re in a town, then there will be a tornado siren, but you can’t hear them from Kev’s parents’ home. One thing I would like to do on Kits and Mortar is to research various weather-related and geological issues such as tornados, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes, but in the meantime, all this talk of basements set me to thinking.
Kev’s parents have an enormous basement. They live in a single storey ranch-style house, and the basement has really good head height and is roughly the size of the house footprint, although I don’t think it extends under the garage. For Americans, this isn’t unusual – lots of houses in the US have basements and they provide not just a massive amount of storage space, but also maybe additional living space, and at the least, a laundry.
Even if you don’t do much more than use the basement to store stuff, I love the idea of having one. It’s cooler than the rest of the house, so with an air recirculation system you can actually use that air to cool the rest of the house on hot days. And of course, if a tornado does come, you can run down to the basement and hide in the northwest corner (relevant bit is Myth #5).
Of course, in the UK we rarely have strong tornados, but we do get about 33 each year which cause minor damage. We also don’t seem to go in for basements quite so much either. In Bath, for example, where I thought there were loads of basements, it turns out that these ‘basement’ flats are in fact at ground level, and the road has been built one storey up, supported by arches and with vaults underneath. Sounds a bit like Ankh-Morpork to me.
You do sometimes find houses with cellars, but again, they are not very common amongst the houses I’ve ever seen. A friend of mine had an old flint and brick house in Arundel which had a cellar accessible from a stairwell that led down off the lounge. It was dark, dank and cold down there, and if you stored anything there for any real amount of time, it would go mouldy. The floor was rubble, and you had to bend over to get in there because the ceiling was so low. Hardly ideal.
I do wonder why we don’t have more basements here, given how useful they are. Is it just a fashion thing? Are basements just out of vogue in the UK? Are they that much more expensive to build? Are there issues keeping them dry? It’s notable in the episodes of Grand Designs that have required a house to be ‘tanked’, i.e. made waterproof, there have always been problems. Kev’s parents use a pump to keep the basement dry, which is problematic if the electricity goes out, as it did one day we were there. But it’s not an insurmountable problem.
I really am curious to know why basements aren’t more common here, so please do leave a comment if you have any insight!
If you have always want to live in a beautiful, ornate wooden house, and have a real knack with sandpaper, then I’ve got the perfect renovation opportunity for you. It might take a bit of effort to get to, as it’s in Solovetskiy, Arkhangel’skaya Oblast’, northern Russia, but it’s a truly beautiful piece of work.
photo by Andrew Qzmn
The photo is part of a series taken by Andrew Qzmn which I highly recommend you go and look at. There are some on his Livejournal, and some more on English Russia.
The house above, and others, have been abandoned to the snow, despite the absolutely wonderful craftsmanship that has gone into them. Furniture was just left in place, making it look like the owners just popped out for a bit and fully intended to come back once they’d finished their shopping. I wonder what happened. Did they leave thinking they’d one day return, or did they pack up as much as they could take, knowing that they’d never see the house again?
Unfortunately, snow and time has done a fair amount of damage – roofs and ceilings have collapsed, walls and floors have given way, and from some photos it looks like the woodworm has been feasting. It makes me sad to see such beautiful work being left to rot.
(Link via Neil Gaiman.)
I had an email from Peter MacLellan the other day, telling me about a “360 degree immersive image” of the interior of Black Sheep House that he put together for the builders, Miles of Harris Construction. He says it “shows all the exposed timberwork before it was plastered. Amazing joinery – it’s a pity it was largely covered up.”
And so it does! Well worth a look, particularly at the roof, which is a little bit more complex than your average. Beautiful work.
I was watching Property Ladder the other day, the show where Sarah Beeny offers expert advice to a couple of property developers which they promptly ignore. The show I was watching included a lady who was renovating a flat in a huge old manor house where the layout was complicated by the fact that in order to get from the kitchen to the dining room you had to go through a third room, effectively turning that room into a very big corridor. Sarah Beeny suggested that she put in a secret door, one disguised to look like a part of the wall or a bookshelf, so that there was access from kitchen to dining room without compromising the character of either.
I thought it sounded like a really good advice and she took the wannabe property developer to a similar place that had a secret door and it worked fabulously well. You could barely tell it was there, decorated as it was just like the rest of the wall. The idea was, predictably, dismissed out of hand.
I really rather like the idea of hidden doors. This one is rather fabulous:
Thank you Kelly Sue.
And there are companies out there that specialise in hidden doors. The aptly named Hidden Door Company has some nice ones, as does Space Dan Diego. If you want really cheesy automated hidden doorways, controlled by a James Bond-esque candlestick or maybe a fingerprint scanner, then Hidden Passageways has some very amusing ideas. These are all US companies, but I am sure there’s some in the UK too.
I definitely think that a hidden doorway has to go on my List of Things I Want In My House!
Kevin and I love books. We have just one sad little bookshelf here in our flat, which holds those books of mine that I cannot live without, and others that we have bought between us since we moved in together. The rest of my books are in boxes in my parents’ loft and Kevin’s are all in boxes in a 5ft x 10ft lock-up in Maryland, USA.
I think one thing that we’re both really looking forward to, one day when we buy a place somewhere, is getting all of our books together in one spot and unpacking them in our own little library. Indeed, I’ve always wanted to have a library, and Kev has to, so I think that it’ll be one thing that’s definitely included in the plans for our house, when we get round to drawing them up.
Thank you, Stewart *
Turns out that we’re not alone in lusting after a library. An article in the Telegraph, Interiors: Rooms that lose none of their shelf life, (found via Shedworking) says that:
In the survey of 4,000 people, 15 per cent said they would like a library compared to 13 per cent wanting a gym, 9 per cent a music studio and just 8 per cent a home cinema.
That doesn’t really surprise me. Books are special things, they have a warmth and humanity lacking from many other physical objects. They have a smell that reminds me of childhood, and they are the instantiation of knowledge, discovery, and escape. Despite the invention of the ebook and ebook reader, I doubt that paper books will ever go away as a product, because collecting and displaying books is still, for some of us, a great joy.
Of course, you need some space to have a room designated specially as a library, but that doesn’t mean you can’t line the walls with books. My Aunty Stella, out in Sydney, Australia, discovered the last time that she moved house that she had 9 cubic metres of books. She discovered this because she packed them all into tea chests which are a metre tall, wide, and deep. She then discovered that a tea chest full of books is too heavy even for beefy Australian removals men to lift. When they weren’t in boxes, her books lined every spare wall in the house on shelves made of planks and bricks – a shelving technique I’ve used myself, but which requires one to have quite considerable faith in the strength of your floor.
If you don’t have enough space for a library, or to line your walls with shelves – we don’t, there are no spare walls in our flat at all – then you could always try the technique used by London couple, Leonie and Rhodri. In remodelling their top-floor flat, they converted their loft into a bedroom and put in a staircase that doubles as a library. (Lots more pictures in the Apartment Therapy gallery or on Gizmodo.)
Personally, I’d be scared of kicking the books, and of going arse over tit down such a steep staircase (it’s almost more ladder than stairs). Being left-handed and left-footed, I’d be likely to put the wrong foot on the wrong tread at the wrong time, and I hate to think what would happen next.
I’ve always had a bit of a thing for libraries that have an upper gallery, such as those you find in castles and stately homes. There’s something about having to go up a ladder, preferably a wrought iron one, to a little balcony in order to fetch down a book that appeals to the hopeless romantic in me. In such a library, the urge to cover remaining wall space in Jacquard tapestries and to have a carved limestone fireplace big enough to talk into would be almost too much to resist.
This gorgeous two-storey library just makes me drool uncontrollably. Kevin too.
Thank you, Champagne Chic
Can you imagine having such an amazingly beautiful library in your house? More to the point, can you imaging having the budget to have such an amazingly beautiful library in your house? Wow. I struggle a bit, but it gives me something to aspire to.
* This is so weird. Wherever possible I use Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr on my blogs, and I reckon that about 50% of the time, the images I use turn out to be from people I know. In this case, not only do I know (vaguely) Stewart Butterfield, he also happens to be one of the people who started Flickr. But the fact that his photo was the first one to shop up on a CC search on ‘home library’ is entirely co-incidental. Obviously I just know a lot of good photographers who use Flickr and CC licences!
If you’ve ever been tempted to run away from it all and escape to the Highlands – and I will admit, I’m tempted every day – you’ll fall in love with Black Sheep House. (Via Shedworking and The Times.)
It used to be a ‘black house’, a single-room dwelling common in the Highland and islands right up until the Second World War. This particular black house was being used as a sheep shed until it was bought by Christine and Pete Hope, who decided to renovate it. It has two double bedrooms, a big living space, underfloor heating, and a Japanese soak tub (a small but deep bath with a seat in it). The views look fabulous views, and the turf roof and stone walls make it blend in beautifully with its surroundings.
Because the build went over-budget, costing £130k instead of £50k, the Hopes have turned it into a guest house, whilst they live in a nearby rented cottage. The cottage sleeps four and goes for between £600 and £1080 per week, which is a bargain if you ask me! I’m obviously not the only person who thinks that, as they’re solidly booked (at time of writing) until late August.
Travel to Black Sheep House could be a bit challenging, though. It’s near Tarbert on the Isle of Harris, which you can get to via ferry from Uig, on the Isle of Skye. That’d be a good 14 hours by car, so you’d probably want to fly.
