Living Small in New Hampshire | Private Home Tour

There is something irresistible about the notion of downsizing. Squeezing out the extraneous. Focusing on the essential. Living an expanded life in a truncated space. Hence the exuberance of the tiny home movement—an arena where approval rises as square footage dwindles. Tables double as beds. Diminutive appliances are stars. It’s fun, it’s environmental, and it’s a teeny-tiny cottage industry.

The movement shows no signs of abating, either. These minuscule abodes can’t begin to house the volume of building, decorating, and downsizing materials devoted to the subject. Websites extol endless shapes and sizes, from mini apartments to gypsy wagons. But is this lifestyle suitable for only the very young, the very flexible, or those slender enough to shower in a broom closet? How small is too small? Can one truly live large in such surroundings?

To answer this, I consulted a tall man who’s rehabbed many houses and worn multiple creative hats.

Long before such things were commonplace, Dan Thibeault and his wife, Joanie, created a camper-size gourmet takeout store called 12 Pine, in Peterborough, New Hampshire. They grew it into a much larger business, sold it, and opened the Shop and Garden at Cross Road, a decor outpost that scrambled French antiques, midcentury modern, and beautiful trinkets—again, ahead of its time.

Along the way, they renovated. “My God, every house we owned needed work!” he remembers. But after Joanie passed away in 2004, Dan sold their home in the country and bought 1,400 square feet of raw loft space at the Union Mill in West Peterborough, a building that was being rescued from near ruin and going green in the process. By the time he finished work on his second-story loft, complete with trellised deck, it was a space that home decor magazines were clamoring over. “I loved it up there,” he says simply. “It was fabulous.”

Meantime, he was painting—expressionist landscapes of the Monadnock Region, where he was born and raised—working out of a raw studio space he’d bought simultaneously in the same building. It featured a row of north-facing windows at street level, a brick-end wall, and high ceilings. “All I did was put in a utility sink, electricity, and track lighting,” he says. “I made it a work space.” At 550 square feet, it was generous.

Over time, expenses for the loft soared. “I was draining my savings, and I got a little panicky,” Dan says. “So I thought, I have this space downstairs. Why don’t I just fix it up and live in that?”

So he sold the loft in 2014 and set to work. “I had a pretty good idea of the layout. It almost spoke to me, how it should be arranged”—that is, simply. The miniature kitchen, with its apartment-sized stove and under-the-counter fridge, overlooks the dining table, which elbows the cozy living room. 

Inventive touches are everywhere, and all materials—like low-VOC paints—are eco-friendly. Dan whitewashed the wood floors with thinned-down Old Fashioned Milk Paint, applying water-based poly to seal them. Overhead, sandblasted beams also got a coat of whitewash, so they wouldn’t dominate the small space. A bedroom alcove was fashioned out of three joined bookcases spotted at a local junk shop; they do double duty as room dividers and clothes closet. The wall treatment is Dan’s own faux-plaster experiment. “It’s really joint compound, thinned down with a gallon of paint, and put on with a roller so it looks like plaster. You don’t even have to sand or paint it.”

Sounds easy enough, but you also have to credit an artist’s instinct for beauty. It certainly helps when you’re transitioning from 1,400 square feet down to one-third of that, doing a deep edit on your belongings.

In choosing what to bring to the new space, Dan says, “I didn’t really give it a lot of thought.” He gestures around the room. “I love that blue chest, for example, so I knew I was going to bring it. I knew I needed a couch, so I brought one down from the loft.” The chandelier over the dining room table is a link to the old Cross Road days. The massive mirror leaning against the wall is a Brimfield find. The wooden chair in the living room was snagged from a junk pile in Greenwich Village. Memories masquerading as furnishings.

It all fit, and with enough room left over for his daughter, Sarah, and her children—Esben, 10; Soren, 8; and Iyla, 5—who are frequent visitors. The studio seems to expand to contain their exuberance and the attendant piles of drawing paper, pens, and Legos.

“You know what?” Dan says. “The stuff I didn’t feel like getting rid of, I put into storage, and it’s still there.” And suddenly he looks at me intently. “The thing is, you don’t miss it. It’s painful in the moment, but then it’s ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ And I don’t really need anything else.”

A TINY TIMELINE

The average home size in this country just keeps expanding: 2,422 square feet in 2016, up by almost 50 percent from the 1970s. Only 1 percent of today’s buyers opt to live in less than 1,000 square feet; less than 500 square feet is generally considered tiny. In the spirit of paring down, here’s a sketch of the tiny house movement.

1854: Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden, his tale of living in a 150-square-foot cabin in the woods.

1987: Tiny Tiny Houses by Lester R. Walker highlights miniatures ranging from icehouses to a build-your-own Thoreau hut.

1998: Sarah Susanka, an architect often credited with inspiring the shift to smaller homes, publishes The Not So Big House, which becomes a best-seller.

1999: After his tiny house on wheels wins “Most Innovative Design” in Natural Home Magazine’s House of the Year contest, Jay Shafer launches Tumbleweed Tiny House Co., the first U.S. company to sell mobile tiny houses.

2002: Shafer joins Shay Salomon, Nigel Valdez, and Gregory Paul Johnson in cofounding the Small House Society in Iowa City, Iowa. 

2011: Vermont’s Yestermorrow Design/Build School adds tiny house building to its curriculum.

2014: The series Tiny House Hunters debuts on HGTV.

2015: The American Tiny House Association is formed, in part to help ensure that tiny houses are accepted as viable dwelling units in communities across the country.

A FEW TINY WEBSITES

Living Big in a Tiny House New Zealand YouTube starBryce Langston spotlights tiny homes around the world. livingbiginatinyhouse.com

Tiny House Blog Kent Griswold, who also publishes the e-magazine Tiny House, shares insights and tips in his posts. tinyhouseblog.com

Tiny House Expedition Documentary filmmakers Christian Parsons and Alexis Stephens roam North America in their little abode. tinyhouseexpedition.com

Tiny House Listings Browse properties for rent or for sale in the U.S. and beyond. tinyhouselistings.com

Small House Style This web magazine offers a compendium of home resources, from builders to books. smallhousestyle.com

Zyl Vardos To see the imagination that builders are applying to tiny homes these days, check out these small wonders from Washington state. zylvardos.com