Azby Brown has a section in his book, “Small Spaces”, where he talks of the Japanese teahouse (chashitsu). “One of the paradoxes inherent in the teahouse - in fact, the genius of the thing - is that when the setting and company are just right, one ceases to be aware of space at all, in plane terms, sometimes all one needs to be truly content is a perfect corner, a good book, and a cup of tea. If one thinks about designing one’s home as discovering what one’s own “perfect corner” needs, then one will be well on the way to learning to appreciate a small space precisely because of its smallness.”
Everyone has a different idea of what “home” means to them. The memory of a swing on a porch, a neighborhood, your room, a big tree in the backyard or the roof you climbed out on to look at the sky. The extraordinary number and variety of tiny houses in the world illustrates that there is no simple rubric for the perfect tiny house. Like the Rubik’s Cube, we take occupant needs, use of space, volume, materials, textures, colors, energy requirements, mechanical system, site location and budget and rotate them around until, hopefully through careful design, we have created our “perfect corner”.
