Small homes, big appeal

Floating minihome, Portland, Ore.

This floating home on Portland's Willamette River was created by Seattle-area architect Russell Hamlet and built in 2008 for $320 a square foot. The owners, a Portland family, use it as a guest house, but it could just as easily be a full-time home.

Hamlet uses numerous design strategies to make this small home feel big. An outside space — a deck, in this case, but it could be a porch, patio or garden — expands the living space. Enclosing the outdoor "room" creates a view to look at from indoors, which adds to the sense of expansiveness. A vaulted ceiling fills the little house with light and makes a tight space feel airy.

Also, Hamlet carefully chose a few vertical elements to draw the eye upward, including high windows and an open ship's ladder to the sleeping loft.

A few big features

One of Hamlet's tricks for making a tiny home seem big is to include a few full-scale features. These fool the eye and create a "large" feel.

The floating minihome's bath has a 3-by-5-foot tiled shower with a skylight, unusual for tiny homes, which often use RV-sized half bathtubs or closet showers. Hamlet also included generous windows to flood the space with light.

Define zones

Carving such a small space into rooms would make it cramped. Instead, Hamlet defined zones within the single open room. The floating minihouse has no doors, except for the bathroom. Distinct areas are designated for the entry, dining, cooking, working, relaxing and, for sleeping, a loft bedroom.

Some are defined by changes in color, others by changes in ceiling height or floor level. Still other zones are marked by built-ins, which also add crucial storage space.

Here, the back of the dining bench forms one edge of the work zone. Big windows flood the area with light for an expansive feeling.

More big tricks

An open loft contributes further to the feeling of bigness in this tiny home. Hamlet says that including windows on at least two sides of each zone gives the occupants plenty of light and long vistas, inviting "unconfined eye-wandering to stretch the space."

Canal House, Venice, Calif.

Los Angeles architect Whitney Sander built his three-story Canal House in 2003 on a small, narrow lot bordering on one of Venice’s famous canals. The 950-square-foot home was designed as a pair of stacked, light-filled cubes and built at a cost of $175 per square foot. Another home — a rental that’s 650 square feet — sits next door on the same lot.

The façade of Canal House facing the water is entirely glass. With neighboring homes squeezed in tightly on either side, the remaining three sides of the house have few windows, to maximize privacy.

Filled with light

An all-white interior gives this small home high style and a feeling of grandeur. Most windows are on the home's front, but because there are few interior walls, daylight fills the house.

The big metal X in the main room is a structural requirement — cross bracing for earthquake protection, necessary in Southern California. Usually, cross bracing is hidden behind walls, but here it becomes a sculptural element.

The curtains at right are a low-cost way to hide storage areas. They also add texture and allow for fewer walls, which would eat into the living area. The downstairs has a great room for living, cooking and dining, and a small powder room, which has the home's only interior door.

Atrium at the center

Canal Home is built around a two-story atrium. Although square footage was sacrificed to create it, it "makes the entire house feel more airy," says Catherine Holliss, interior designer for Sander Architects. She lives here with Sander, her husband, who designed the home.

The atrium is constructed from panels of translucent sanded acrylic, a low-cost material. The horizontal panels hang above the main living area and occupy the center of the open second story. They work as walls and handrails along the blue-black steel stairs.

Upstairs has a baby area with bookcases, washer, dryer and closet, and a flight of bamboo stairs to the master bedroom with a closet and bathroom.

Open bath

The upstairs bath's interior walls, made of the same inexpensive sanded acrylic panels as the atrium, flood the room with light. To conserve energy, Canal House has efficient, radiant-heat floors and an on-demand water heater.

Light-filled bedroom

The bedrooms are upstairs, where there are no doors: The bedroom and bathroom are open to each other. The glazed front of the house attracts warm sunlight in winter.

"Green" components include bamboo floors and steel fins on the south side of the house that draw cooling breezes from the canal into high, awning-shaded windows. Although it's in Southern California, the home doesn't have — or need — air conditioning.

Slot House, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Slot House is the creation and home of another architectural couple, architect Margarita McGrath and designer Scott Oliver of noroof Architects. The narrow, two-story home in the historic Fort Green neighborhood of Brooklyn was built in the 1700s. McGrath and Oliver bought and remodeled it between 2002 and 2005.

They wanted to see their 60-foot maple tree from inside, so they cut the big, two-story slot window in the front façade, on the left in the photos. The cut revealed that, beneath drywall and vinyl siding, the home was constructed from cedar timbers and handmade brick. Altogether, it has 1,000 square feet of enclosed living area, including Oliver and McGrath's 600-square-foot house and a 400-square-foot rental apartment.

High style from inexpensive materials

In the upstairs living-dining area, McGrath and Oliver exposed one wall of pre-Revolutionary-War-era brick. The first and second floors are united by the open staircase and an open metal mesh screen that lets light filter up and down.

The home gets its high style from tasteful use of inexpensive industrial products, including metal bookcases, railings, stairs, grates and screens. The industrial metal and clean, white drywall interact nicely with the warmer wood and brick. Behind the metal screen in the center of the photo is a wheeled dining table/desk, made of a solid wood door. It's rolled to the center of the room and unfolded for dinner parties.

Upstairs living room

Here's another view of the living room. The kitchen and bathroom also are on this level.

High ceilings and lots of windows and skylights bathe the interior in light, all of which help make the small space feel grand. Sections of the home's wood floor were replaced with metal grates that, along with the open stairwell, let light reach everywhere, making the small, narrow home feel open and spacious.

Ground floor: wood and metal

Much like the Venice Canal House, Slot House has an open, light-filled space in the center that joins the top and bottom stories.

Here's the ground-floor bedroom; a corner of the bed is visible in the right foreground. In their quest for inexpensive furnishings, the couple found the galvanized metal stairs in an industrial catalog for $2,000. The panel framing the stairwell is made from inexpensive hollow-core wood doors. To the right of the stairs is a steel-framed storage chest that's used instead of a dresser. At left, a ladder descends to a heated, low-ceiling basement holding the home's mechanical systems and storage.

Galley and guest room

The home's tiny kitchen is as compact and efficient as a ship's galley. It looks high-end, but the cabinets are from Ikea and the stainless steel appliances are from Sears. The kitchen doubles as a guest room. The bars at right are a security grille that slides across the window. The grille is also used as a ladder to access the guest bunk above the counter, at left. Outside the window is a 200-square-foot rooftop deck.

Hidden storage

Noroof Architects designed the remodel of this 540-square foot apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side for a family of four. The home is called the "Finger Apartment" because it's housed in a long, skinny space.

Here, in the master bedroom, drawers pull out from under the bed and doors lift up from the floor to reveal hidden storage compartments. The millwork is by STRand, of Salem, Va.

Furniture does double duty

One of the tricks to getting maximum advantage from a small home is to use a space for two or more purposes. The child's bedroom in the Finger Apartment uses a Hidden Bed, allowing it to double as a study area. The desk is pulled out in the photo to the left. It folds into the wall as the bed drops out, shown in the photo to the right. The desk surface stays horizontal, even when it's tucked out of sight, so you can put it away while it's piled with books and papers.

Presto-change-o: A dining room

The dining table in the tiny, elegant Finger Apartment drops out of the wall between two living-room windows. When the table is down, a bookcase built into the wall is exposed. A rolling wine cart supports the table, then rolls away when the table is collapsed into the wall.

weeHouse customized prefabs

Most small or tiny homes are, like those in the previous photos, one-of-a kind creations — architects' pet projects or their own homes. weeHouse, by Minnesota-based architectural firm Alchemy, is one of the few small/tiny homes that are available for purchase.

weeHouse homes look a lot like cargo containers, right down to the intentionally rusted paint on the cement fiberboard exterior. But they are not. Architect Geoffrey Warner designs each home around the prefabricated module, a 14-foot-wide rectangular box that varies in length. The boxes may be placed side by side or stacked. The module arrives with plumbing, wiring, walls, floors and cabinets at the prepared site. Utility hookups, decks and sun-shielding canopies are installed separately.

This home's cost — $149,000, or $220 per square foot — includes a sprinkler system, Ikea kitchen and bamboo paneling on walls and ceilings. This 677-square-foot house, on Palomar Mountain, near San Diego, has one bedroom and one bathroom.

Keeping costs down

weeHouse minimizes transportation costs by using one of its small networks of modular-home factories around the country. Each module is constructed as near to its building site as possible.

Here, a vacation studio home is unloaded at its site in Marfa, Texas. On the truck is a smaller unit, which will contain the laundry, home mechanical systems and storage.

"The system is adaptable to a wide range of needs and makes modern design accessible to a wide range of audiences," says Betsy Gabler, weeHouse spokeswoman.

How it looks

Here's the 756-square-foot Marfa, Texas, weeHouse, installed on its concrete foundation.

Northwood's weeHouse

This weeHouse, near Lake Superior in northern Minnesota, joins two weeHouse modules — one placed horizontally and the other stood on end. The horizontal section is topped by a rooftop deck. The vertical section includes a first-floor bedroom and a guest room on the second story, accessible from an exterior stairway. The $165,000 cost, in 2005, included the factory-installed kitchen, built-in furnishings, plumbing, heating, wiring and maple floors.

Inside finishes

Viewed from the downstairs bedroom, the Northwood's weeHouse is light and handsome. A sliding door on a track separates the bedroom from the galley kitchen. The owner, a skilled woodworker, did much of the interior finishing. All weeHouses are 14 feet wide, to allow transportation on interstates.