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Future and Past Experience Small Architectural Collision
I’ve long expressed my enthusiasm for clever renovations of old spaces. The fact is that even though new buildings might seem like the future, most of the architectural future was built in the last 150...
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What’s Right With This Picture?
From above, this picture shows a fairly normal suburban neighborhood. There are large, single family homes, each with their own driveways, front and back yards. But if you look closely, right between N...
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In Quest for Home, Man Chooses to Build Rather than Borrow
If you didn’t know it already, the modern home-ownership model is pretty flawed for most. Homeowners are expected to take on massive amounts of debt in the form of a mortgage, the great percentage of...
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Stylish Little House Fit For a Family
While it’s a nice idea to think a family could live in a sub 300 sq ft tiny house, the reality is that at a certain point you have to concede you can only downsize so much before quality of life is...
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Live, Work, Haul Lots of Stuff
When our stuff is stationary there’s no reason to get rid of it. The force of gravity can support the biggest mess from the worst hoarder. But when our stuff is put in motion, either supported by the...
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Large Lego-Like Blocks Can Make Anyone a Builder
Along with thrift and above average height, my father passed down an aversion for building stuff. I’ve often pondered if my minimalist tendencies are just the offshoot of this aversion–i.e. doing...
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Baugruppen: Urban Housing for the People, by the People
Real estate is a big and often lucrative business. The reason is fairly simple. Because they build at scale, developers enjoy financing, purchasing and construction discounts individual homebuyers do...
View ArticleBreather Investment Might Show that People Will Subscribe to Anything
This site profiled the company Breather a couple years ago right after its launch. For lack of a more original description, Breather does for living and meeting rooms what Airbnb does for bedrooms. Via...
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Tiny Ukrainian Apartment Does Heavy Lifting
This 200 sq ft apartment from Ukrainian architects 1 Studio does a nice job of using its small cube-like interior space. The interior design contains a living room, a very small kitchen area and...
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Growing Old Together and in Style
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: the conversation about compact, efficient housing focuses way too much on so-called Millennials and not nearly enough on the ever-increasing numbers of older...
View ArticleVideo: Man Goes Beyond Off Grid, Going Under It
Happy Friday! Sit back, relax, grab a bowl of cereal and watch this Fair Companies video of Dan Price and his Hobbit hole home. Be prepared to feel like your life is a wasteful, complicated mess. It’s...
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Growing Old Together and in Style, in the City
Last week I posted about the Cheesecake Cohousing Consortium–an 11 person senior community located in Mendocino, CA. The post proved very popular, but a number of commenters remarked about the dearth...
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A Small Apartment for All Seasons and Whole Family
One of the most interesting and talented architecture firms specializing in small space design is Spain’s PKMN (aka pacman). We looked at their “ALL I OWN” apartment–a budget conscious transforming...
View ArticleOops! We Just Destroyed Affordable Market-Rate Housing. Our Bad.
This site has long followed Seattle’s ongoing micro-apartment saga. Here’s a somewhat quick summary: for the last several years, Seattle developers had been fast and furiously building low to medium...
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IKEA Takes on Transforming Interior Design and Furniture
The moving wall in the LifeEdited apartment was one of its most innovative and useful features. Not only did it house an office, a projection screen and a bunch of storage, but moving it out divided...
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Tiny, Prefab, Plug-and-Play Housing Coming to a City Near You
When we last caught up with Professor Jeff Wilson he was living in dumpster. The reason he was holing up in such an unlikely structure wasn’t merely for shock value (though that was part of it). He was...
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Our House In the Middle of the Street
If you have ever visited Salt Lake City or other cities settled by Mormons, you might have noticed unusually wide streets. The reason is that their grids were based on an agricultural utopian plan...
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The Oracle of Awesome, Affordable, Urban Living
There’s an ideal we promote on this site about the perfect edited life. Here’s how it goes: live in compact apartment without much stuff in walkable, culturally vibrant city. Work and friends are just...
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See How this Family of 7 (Happily) Shares a 1K Sq Ft Vancouver Condo
Living with five kids under one roof can seem like a daunting proposition for many. But that’s exactly what Adrian Crook is doing. But he is not raising the children–who range in ages 3 to 9–in some...
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Dorm Living for Grown Ups
In the mid-aughts, Professor and architect Hector Perez of Woodbury University pooled together several faculty members to purchase lots of land in the Barrio Logan neighborhood in San Diego. Their hope...
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