Three Years in the Tiny House

We lived in three hundred square feet for three years. Then, in 2020, a wildfire took it.

I mention the fire early because it's the hinge of the experiment. For three years the question I was asking was whether a small, highly-designed house could be a good place to live — not in a Kinfolk way, not as minimalism performed for a camera, but as a daily condition. For three years the answer was yes. Then the answer became something else: the house was gone, but the life it had built wasn't. That's the report I can actually make.

The design was the thesis

Bela and I spent months on design before construction started. Not because we liked drawing — because every inch mattered in a way it doesn't in a normal house, and we wanted the constraints to push us toward clarity, not compromise.

We put windows on every wall. A skylight over the bed. A full-size kitchen because we cook every day and a half-kitchen would have meant lying about who we were. A walk-in closet, in three hundred square feet, because storage is everything and a real closet makes the rest of the house feel uncluttered. A ground-floor bedroom — a bed that felt like a bed — instead of a loft you climb a ladder to reach.

Every one of those choices was a bet. Writing them out now makes them sound obvious. None of them were obvious at the time.

What constraint does

The thing about living in a small, well-designed house is that you stop thinking about the house. You think about what you are doing in it. The building is finished. The life isn't.

This is the part I wouldn't have guessed. I thought we were running an experiment on what you can fit in three hundred square feet. Really we were running an experiment on what three hundred square feet asks of you.

The answer is: show up. Cook. Clean. Notice when the light moves across the room. There is nowhere to hide from the condition of your own life, because the house is too small to contain the mess of ignoring it.

I didn't know that going in.

What we got wrong

Not much I would call wrong. A few things I would weight differently starting over.

The outdoor infrastructure came too late. We built the house, then figured out the deck and the covered area as we went. In retrospect those were part of the house, not adjuncts to it, and should have been designed on day one.

We underestimated how loudly sound carries in a small space. That's a thing that gets worse with time, not better.

And we should have built more storage into the architecture — not more shelves, more built-ins. Every square foot of unused vertical is a square foot of your floor plan you didn't claim.

None of these are advice. They're just what the practice taught me.

After the fire

The fire took everything. The house, the tools, the notebooks, the drawings — all of it.

What it did not take was the body of skills we had built: how to design a small space that actually works, how to live together in a condition of constraint, how to treat everyday life as material. Those are portable. We took them north, into the Blue Ridge Mountains, and started Asheville Forest Baths.

The house was not the experiment. The house was the setup. The experiment was whatever we did inside it — and whatever we can still do, now that it is gone.