ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF DESIGN about Jay Shafer and the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.

Tiny houses are built on trailer platforms. Typically, they are between a hundred and a hundred and thirty square feet, roughly the size of a covered wagon. They aren’t toys or playhouses or aesthetic gestures, and they aren’t shacks or cottages, either. Shacks don’t have kitchens and bathrooms, and a cottage is larger than a tiny house. There are between several hundred and a thousand tiny houses in the United States. People who live in tiny houses, or aspire to, appear to fall into one of three overlapping categories. The first consists of young people who see a tiny house as a means of owning a place while avoiding property taxes and maybe rent, since they can often find places to park their house free. The second group includes older men and women who have either sold or walked away from a house they couldn’t afford. The third group is composed of people determined to live environmentally responsible lives—to live “lightly,” as they put it. The rhetoric of modern tiny-house living begins with the assertion that big houses, aside from being wasteful and environmentally noxious, are debtors’ prisons. Their owners work in order to afford them, and when they actually occupy them they’re anxious. Tiny houses are luxurious, because they are easier to take care of and allow their (presumably debt-free) owners to spend more money on pleasures. Jay Shafer is the brainy misfit behind the tiny-house trend and the builder of the most stately tiny houses. He built his first tiny house in Iowa, in 1999, and lived in it for five years. It was a hundred and ten square feet. Shafer has lived in three tiny houses. He owns a design-and-build company called Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, and he has built sixteen tiny houses. Tumbleweed offers plans for seven tiny houses. In the past year, it has sold a thousand plans, but Shafer doesn’t know how many houses have been built from them. Shafer designs by subtraction. He began drawing imaginary houses, and they grew smaller as he started “to figure out what I could get rid of—mostly square footage, because a lot of space wasn’t used that efficiently.” His galvanizing imperative came when he learned, around 1999, that the houses he was drawing and not showing to anyone would violate building codes. Also tells about tiny houses built by Jay King in Danbury, Connecticut, and Elizabeth Turnbull in New Haven.