Little did I know that a sideways glance at a small traditional house on a Greek island would lead headlong, at the age of 60, into the ownership of what many might call “a tiny home.”
It had plenty of features that were undeniably vintage Greek: the spacious stone terrace, the outside-accessed bathroom, the obligatory whitewashed walls and wooden shutters, the uncomplicated kitchen (a fireplace and good-for-gutting-fish sink), and its enjambment in the warp and weft of a tightly knit village. Its bones, however – small, strong and simple – made it a poster child for that trend in housing this side of the pond known as the tiny house movement.
The notion of downsizing our homes, and lifestyles to fit them, appeared on our radars about 20 years ago. With “The Not So Big House” (1997), American architect Sarah Susanka’s treatise on the “build better, not bigger” concept in residential architecture, homeowners began to seek ways to live more simply and sustainably.
A subsequent memoir by one of the founders of the Small House Society entitled Put Your Life on a Diet (Johnson, 2008), added a graphic punch to the movement, and the urgency of eschewing runaway consumption and wastefulness. With the size of an average home in North America rising from 1,780 sq feet to 2,662 sq feet between 1973 to 2013, and consumer debt in Canada reaching two trillion by 2016, reducing the size of one’s home demanded a serious rethink about our domestic needs.
Initially, the “rules” of this tiny-home-inspired diet were stringent. Building codes set the maximum size for a tiny home at 400 sq ft or less (another 50 sq ft would vault it into the “small house” category).
Economic use of space – utilizing furniture and fixtures that could double as storage spaces and optimizing the house’s vertical space (like installing a mezzanine floor to house a sleeping loft) – became essential to the design of a breathable micro-house.
Maximizing energy efficiency and using space-saving equipment and appliances ensured that the tiny home met the desired environmental goals. Optionally outfitting the tiny home with wheels, enabling the owner to roost where conditions were most favourable (often within a community of other tiny-home dwellers), reduced the home’s footprint even more.
Convincing in its philosophical form, the reality of living in a tiny home has met with varying degrees of success.
The savings, the prudent use of space and materials, and the keen sense of familial togetherness that micro-housing engenders are all outcomes that invariably delight owners. And just as often become the project’s Achilles’ heel.
In “Teeny Homes, Big Lies” (Globe & Mail, January 6, 2016), writer Erin Anderssen reports that, after 10 weeks in their summer cottage the size of a birdhouse, her family looks forward to real rooms and private spaces.
“It’s good we’re leaving while we still like each other,” observes one of her sons, and she concludes “it is the ocean that brings us back each year.”
There are others whose ardour for tiny living wanes over time. A couple in Arkansas despair “How can you grow a human in that space?” after trying to live in each other’s pocket for 18 months.
A retired couple find their tiny home perfect as a second home when the sun is shining, and their living space is doubled by their patio, but are only too happy to up-size to their rancher when the weather confines them to one room and a rain-soaked view. The consensus is clear: tiny homes are best appreciated from outside.
Luckily, I had intuited the importance of sun and sea before embarking on the “Mediterranean diet” necessary to slim down our lives enough to wriggle into 400 square feet of stone, and wander on a Greek island.
While the house’s two rooms are a snug fit, life enlarges the moment you step outside. We look down onto a bay as wide as a smile bordered by a harmonious gaggle of harbourside buildings and a rank of beach umbrellas between shore and tamarisk trees. On the horizon hover the mountains of Turkey.
At night, when the lights of the town emerge, the scene changes to a luminescent canvas of lights that sweep from harbour to sky.
A quick scamper down the steps from our terrace, through a zigzag of lanes and stairways, brings us to the village square.
Here, the kafeneios and tavernas invite you to linger a while with your cuppa and conversation under the flowering fig trees. You can’t help noticing that, like your Lilliputian home, the scale of the square, the shops and restaurants clotted around it, and the three-wheeled trucks and miniature island bus that rattle by, are equally bijoux in size. No strangers, the Greeks, to “living with less.”
Terrace, village square, footpaths by the sea. Beyond the village, “outside” expands to an island small enough to be explored on foot. Goat paths and kalderimia (ancient cobblestoned trails) hug hillsides high above the Aegean and meander past a few toppled castles, a couple Byzantine monasteries, countless tiny white chapels hidden in groves of oleanders, and plenty of relics from bygone eras.
It is easy to give in to imaginings of life long ago and let the words of writer Patrick Leigh Fermor nudge you still further into the hills: “All of Greece is absorbing and rewarding. There is hardly a rock or stream without a battle or myth or a peasant anecdote or a superstition; and talk and incident, nearly all of it odd or memorable, thicken round the traveller’s path at every step.”
The rich flora and fauna on this island – fed by a network of underground springs – has reputedly drawn both gods and mortals to its shores. Telos, the son of the sun god Helios, came looking for herbs to heal his mother, and a poetess – Erinna – was inspired by its beauty 2,500 years ago.
On this spring day, I follow the paths of gods and poets until one begins to spiral down to the sea. Wiry clumps of wild thyme and sage, chutes of loose shale, and scattered stones of the old terrace walls demand that I pay attention to my feet rather than the turquoise shimmer of the water below.
A goat, startled by the cascading rock and brightly coloured figure tumbling past it, skitters out of my way, and turns to eye my progress from a safe distance below.
I scramble down the hillside over the final terrace, and after releasing myself from the spikes of the gorse guarding the shore, I step onto the beach.
Throwing off my clothes, I teeter drunkenly across the pebbles, and plunge into the purifying waters of The Great Sea. Tiny home. Big fat world.
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