Rate this book

Tiny Houses (2009)

by Mimi Zeiger(Favorite Author)

3.42 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0847832031 (ISBN13: 9780847832033)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Rizzoli

review 1: Where to start on this review? It is a space (although small) so ripe for comment:1) Why on Earth did I read this book? I saw it while browsing at the library website and thought the concept of designing a home to be space efficient would be interesting and educational. The weird use of space in homes bugs me (I want more of this and less of that), so I was interested to see what was in this book.2) The pictures: were frequently lovely and sometimes reflected the space well but other times left me really wondering where the person was standing and wanting more details on the dwelling. The floor plan illustrations were confusing to me at times, which is odd, because normally I'm fine reading floor plans. I still don't know what I was missing there.3) The "houses" thems... moreelves: many interesting, a few had very useful and creative uses of space, and many struck me as an architect's Utopian fantasy that had nothing to do with reality. Allow me to sample: "Essentially it is an oxidized steel-clad box, lined with fir on the interior. There is no electricity and no internal bathroom. But what the house lacks in amenities it makes up for in design and materials." REALLY???!!! (And before anyone gets all "well, in third world countries..." on me, bear in mind that this home is a prefab housing unit in Wisconsin built in 2004. I'm suspecting there isn't a huge market for this home.)Oddly, it was actually this third point that made this book worth reading. Just for the voyeuristic joy of ogling some really bizarre dwellings (including one in Belgium built "in a former red light district and outfitted with an entirely glass facade," with colorful neon lights around each window to ensure that passersby notice the structure, the inhabitants, and the unenclosed toilet. Many of the homes leave me saying, "Huh???" 3/5
review 2: jared picked this up for me at the library because he knows that i am obsessed with tiny houses. if i was still single, i would totally buy one of those tiny little victorians that people set up in, like, their uncle's driveway or whatever. but i can't do that as long as i live with jared because he likes to pile enormous stacks of books, papers, dishes, clothing, shoes, curtains, tools, etc on every available surface. i couldn't live with the clutter in a smaller space.this book is mostly just photographs of tiny houses, defined by the editor as houses that clock in under 1000 square feet. this took me aback. jared & i measured our own house, which is a one-bedroom bungalow most likely built in the 1920s. it's between 700 & 800 square feet. so technically, it's a tiny house. i don't feel like i live in a tiny house though. i feel like i live in a one-bedroom house. it really doesn't seem any smaller than most apartments i've lived in. & it's considerably larger than some...anyway.combine the rather large "tiny house" footprint with the fact that the author was much more interested in aesthetics than functionality, & you have a coffee table book full of so-called tiny houses that are completely uninhabitable. sure, people can & in some cases do live in some of the house, but a lot of them are just architecture experiments--people mucking around with green materials or unusual window treatments or whatever. i don't really care about architecture so i did not find this remotely exciting. my interest in tiny houses comes from wondering how much space is really enough for a person to live a normal, satisfying life. i think that if you have to find a backyard to park your house in with a friend who will let you use their bathroom, it doesn't count. if you can't cook in your tiny house & there's no cold storage for, like, a gallon of milk, i don't want to hear about it. if you can't live in it when it's snowing or when it's the dead of summer because it's not weather-tight/appropriately insulated, i'm done. pretty much every tiny house in this book was an exhibition piece for an archutectural firm or some kind of weird art project. ugh. less

Download links for: Tiny Houses

Advertising