Livin' Large in 250 Square Feet
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 07. 2.07
Industrial designer Dirk Dieter lives in a 250 square foot house that probably was originally a warming shed for local fishermen. "This house has an interesting history of people who lived here, trying to live very humbly and inexpensively," Dieter, 47, said as he guided an understandably short tour of the property. He has opened it up inside, added all of 20 square feet plus a garage. He lists a number of tricks for designing for small spaces:
-- Nix doors that swing. Find cabinets with sliding doors, and use curtains or shades to partition off space. (Dieter's "laundry room" is a nook stashed behind a natural-fiber shade.)
-- Multipurpose furniture, such as Dieter's futon, and folding furniture, especially chairs, add flexibility. These pieces do not have to be ugly; Dieter has found modern and comfortable chairs at Ikea and Design Within Reach.
-- Put furniture on rollers for easy cleaning and access to partitioned areas. Some rollers come with brakes or locks, providing stability for beds and couches.
-- Build into the walls to create nooks and display areas, but don't build into the room with molding, baseboards or even door and window frames. Even carpet intrudes on space; Dieter used bamboo on his floors. "Basically, everything that comes into the room, I'm taking away," he said.
-- Make cardboard prototypes for possible additions to make sure they'll fit into the scheme of everyday life. Dieter even put up a mockup of his range hood to confirm that yes, it really did need to be just 3 inches deep to ensure that it wouldn't regularly meet with his head.
-- Think vertically. Narrow spaces between cabinets and appliances create storage for pans and cutting boards. An Ikea accessory that affixes to the ceiling and floor provides a full-length mirror and hat or coat hooks. Dryer stacks atop washer.
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Good grief, why on earth have they got a garage? What a staggering amount of space to give over to a car! They could triple the size of their living area by simply parking the car outside! I wonder if they know that cars are designed to cope in the rain...
...Or maybe they just love their car more than their own comfort. Certainly it's an impressive piece of squeezing things into small spaces, but it might also help to rethink what actually needs an inside 'room' of its own - I'd say the car has to go!
The story is a bit repetitive
That **** Ctrl V.
;-).
While I commend Mr. Dieter for smartly fitting out a 250 sf space to live well in, I can't help but find myself disterbed by the fact that the garage space is every bit as large as the living space (200 sf is my guess).
If anything, I suppose this project illustrates to me just how pervasive personal autos have become in our lives, and I can't help but wonder what that extra 200 sf could be used for....
Wow, his space is so efficient, you can list all of the tricks twice!
(LA: Thanks, I have fixed that...)
Please not that the garage is the largest room in the house. This generally also holds true for average sized houses with a 2 car garage!
Any pictures of the interior? I'd say this is one extremely focused and disciplined guy. Pulling this off and keeping it livable is quite a trick. His job is made harder since the house is narrow. With a squarer footprint you could have a good bit more usable living space.
Great lessons here that can be transfered to much larger projects!
The story says that Dirk collects things such as car bumpers and kitchen appliances to use in his work. He designs furniture. Hence the garage.
I have to agree on the huge garage...the automobile has a more pleasing space than the human.
It's a springboard toward better smaller homes. This particular model does not do a lot for me. I personally need a lot of book shelves and a separate bedroom.
Dirk must be single and does not entertain groups more than three.
In defense of the garage, while I think that garages are in general a useless waste of money, it could very well be that this garage serves a very important purpose.
In order to live in 250 sf, you need to have room to store stuff, unless you are also an ascetic. For instance, that broom that the owner is using the photo would take up a ridiculous fraction of the available living area if put inside. A garage can serve as a storage area for the many things required to maintain and upgrade your home.
I would assume that much of the garage, then, is given over to such storage and that a single car is parked inside the neatly organized area. I'm not sure that he could be much more space-efficient with his tiny lot than that. And it's completely possible that his road doesn't allow parking along it.
Having lived on a sailboat for a few years, I would have appreciated the 250sq ft and a garage. Give the guy a break about the garage. Considering his living space...the garage might contain a scooter, and a bunch of flex space for a workshop and tools. A simple name as garage could be construed as car, but for myself its "Mantown".
My nearest neighbor out here in the middle of nowhere in the countryside is an Irish-Canadian Buddhist monk. He lives in a 4m by 5m cabin that I helped him design and build. In that 20 meter square space he has one 4m by 3.5m living-dining room-study area that becomes his bedroom at night when he opens up the sofa bed. His study table becomes his dining table when he eats. He has a small kitchenette in one back corner and a small equally sized bathroom in the other back corner. And there is a small patio in front of the house that is some 4m by 2.5m where he often entertains me and my wife (and others) when we visit him. He says that living alone in peace and quiet in the middle of nowhere without many visitors, the space of the cabin is more than enough for him. Since I designed the cabin to be passive solar, the south wall (the four meter side) is mostly a glass wall of sliding doors which open onto the patio. So the patio and living room look like an extended space. Actually the interior of the cabin and the exterior seem to blend together as he is always staring out the front wall windows for most activities and since he tiled and stuccoed the walls and ceiling a light bluish white color with whiteish streaks that make the interior look much like the exterior sky. He uses most of the tips listed above to make the interior space as useful as possible, and many many more other ones. People don't really need much space to live comfortably. It all depends on how tied you are to material things. Some may say that this guy is a Buddhist monk and so one should expect him to be comfortable in such a small space. But compared to the other Buddhist monk that also lives near him (Swiss guy), he is living the big life. The other monk lives in something half as big with no water or electricity - permanently. Oh, my Irish monk friend has a car with no need for a garage. He simply sometimes parks the car under a tree to keep it in the shade.
This is from the original San Francisco Chronicle article:
So it's not so much a garage as a storage space.
The article also notes that Dieter views the garage as a way for him to practice living a simpler life. Implication seems to be that he'll eventually decrease the amount of stuff that he'll have overall.
It can even have a 2nd floor , just cut some garage space close to the bed, and there's your "Think vertically" :)
(Sorry for my english)
i love it! my cottage is a whopping 750 sq feet, so i am used to small. i really like the efficient layout of this place and yes, there would be room for books- but that doesn't have to be excessive- libraries are great resources and they must be used if we are to keep them around. how much stuff do we really need to have? ah, and the garage would be a wonderful work shop/studio.
Considering that the concrete slab and roofing account for a large part of the house "shell" a two car garage with an above garage apartment makes sense.
A standard 24x24 foot garage would yield a more reasonable 576 square feet for about the same money!
So with the garage (what we in NY would label "walk-in closet" on a floorplan), that's ~400sf, the size of a typical NYC studio apartment. Shall the thousands of us who live in those expect a knock on the door from a breathless reporter wondering where-oh-where we ingeniously store our cookie sheets and dustpans?
How dare this evil man build a one-car garage! I know 87% of the readers of this website believe the automobile was invented by Satan, but really. Those who actually bothered to read the linked article discovered the garage is indeed used as a closet, as well as for his hobby/work. It's fairly small for a garage. It's probably not heated. And even it it wasn't, so what? Would it be so bad to want to be able to unload groceries without running through the rain? I think the guy earned it.
Personally, I'd love to move out of my 950 square foot house into a small apartment over a 2-car shop/garage. Need some place to build kayaks and bkes, maybe even an electric car some day.
Well, at least he has a garage! (Smile)
Look closer at the picture. The street he is standing on is pretty narrow, not unusual for that area. Second, it is very probable that city ordinances do no allow cars parked on the street. No yard, no real driveway, hence a garage.