Green Options » small homes

Prefab Resources, Tiny House Ideas, and Small Dwelling Design Links

Lucille Chi — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:59:23 +0000

Check out the prefab community blooming online these days! Tiny House Village is trying to connect communities of creative small dwellings. Ideas are abound for these eco communities with Resources For Life’s Small House Society.

Tiny House design has a great set of resources all linked here as well. Check out the plethora of architectural resources,

Green Talk Radio: The Not So Big House

Sean Daily — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 11:00:54 +0000

Sean Daily, Green Living Ideas’ Editor-in-Chief, discusses small home living and the growth of New Urbanism with Sarah Susanka of Susanka Studios, author of The Not So Big House.

[Courtesy of our friends at GreenLivingIdeas.com]

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Do More With a Smaller House

Dawn Killough — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:09:37 +0000

Smaller homes are energy efficient, use less materials, and take up less land. But how do you make a 1200-1500 square foot home on a small lot appealing for a buyer?

Forest Creek Development in Parrish, Florida has discovered the secret. Their cottage program offers homes no larger than 1600 square feet, all on lots that are 27 feet wide. And, they are selling like hotcakes!

Here are some ideas on how to design a small home that has market appeal:

1. “Let the light in” - Window walls and windows set high up on the wall let in lots of light, allow the placement of furniture, and make the spaces seem larger.

2. “Make the indoors private” - Placement of windows is key when homes are so close together (as close as one foot in Forest Creek). Stagger window placement in each house so no one has to worry about being looked in on.

3. “Reserve outdoor space that’s private” - High outside walls allow families to have privacy in their yards, as well as their houses.

Green Communities, Part 2: Cottage Communities

Philip Proefrock — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:30:42 +0000

Sometimes, some of the greenest solutions come from the simplest of ideas. Take the cottage community. What could be simpler than the idea of building houses that are radically smaller in square footage than the national average? Not everyone wants all that extra space, and many would rather have a smaller home built well than a cheaply made box full of emptiness.

Cottage communities are not yet widely known in planning and development. Cottage communities are primarily located in the Pacific Northwest, though there are indications of interest, if not actual communities yet built, in other parts of the country.

The individual cottages have a small footprint. The first cottage community built in Langley WA had half the cottages no bigger than 800 square feet, and the other half no bigger than 700 square feet. These homes are far smaller than the average size house in the U.S. (which was almost 2,400 square feet in 2004).

Cottages serve a niche community. Obviously, a family of more than 3 or 4 people would start to feel crowded living the typical American lifestyle in such a space. But many households have only one or two people, and a 700-800 square foot house is perfectly adequate for them.

Cottages work best where several cottages can be placed near one another. If you still require a full size lot for every home, a cottage doesn’t really do anything towards reducing sprawl. But a cottage development typically has twice the number of houses as would normally be permitted. So a piece of land that could normally accommodate four houses can be developed with eight cottages. By developing as a community, cottages also benefit from common amenities such as landscaping and shared parking areas. (The small size of the cottages precludes attaching garages to them.)

While cottages reduce the amount of land needed for development, they also reduce the volume of resources needed in their construction. It is intuitively obvious that an 800 square foot cottage takes much less material, from studs and shingles to pipes and cupboards, than an average sized 2,400 square foot home. In addition to all that material saved, the smaller cottages also need fewer resources to keep them heated and cooled.

Cottage communities can break up the texture of an otherwise undifferentiated development, and provide opportunities for other kinds of owners to be added into the housing mix. While they serve the needs of a limited part of the population, they can contribute to better communities with just a simple idea.

images via: The Cottage Company