Live in twenty-two square metres for a week and you begin noticing things you would never have thought about in a normal house.
Which way the door faces. Where the sun lands at four in the afternoon in July. Whether the wind is coming over the hill or up along the valley, because you can hear the difference through the wall. People in big houses have central heating and an extractor fan and don’t need to know any of this. In a tiny home the information is useful and eventually you’re the one telling people it’ll rain Thursday, and being right.
Hence the antique barometer. An old one, mahogany and brass, that banjo shape, a dial about the size of a saucer. You tap the glass, the needle shifts a little, and you know roughly what tomorrow intends to do. It hangs on a wall, so it takes none of your floor space, which in a tiny home is the only currency that matters. It doesn’t require power nor does it need updating. And it looks considerably better than anything with a screen.
Very little gets thrown away, either, and it isn’t really about virtue, there’s nowhere to keep the thing you’re throwing out while you decide about it, so you give it a job instead. Offcuts become shelves. The towel rail is usually an old ladder. Someone I know has a dinghy seat for a bench, the storage locker underneath still doing exactly what it did on the water. Jars, crates, a drawer out of a dead dresser mounted upside down beneath a table.
This is the part people get wrong about tiny homes. They expect camping. What they find is some of the most considered interiors anywhere, and the reason is not taste, it’s exposure. Nothing can be hidden. There’s no spare room to put the ugly chair in. Everything sits in plain view of everything else, and that concentrates the mind. Large houses absorb your mistakes. Small ones put them on show.
The materials tend to sort themselves out too. Timber, wool, brass, enamel, cotton,things that wear rather than fall apart. A chipped enamel jug looks better chipped. The plastic version only looks broken.
You don’t need a tiny home for any of this, of course. You could live like this in four bedrooms if you had the discipline. Most of us don’t, which is rather the point.