MNN - Mother Nature Network

In the opening of a post yesterday about a stunning manufactured vacation home in Spain, I mentioned the small house trend (said vacation home itself isn’t so tiny) and its symbiotic relationship with prefab building — a majority of the noteworthy prefab homes I’ve featured are, in fact, pint-sized by most standards, some impossibly so.

 

Well, you know that the small house movement has truly entered America’s collective consciousness when PBS interrupts regularly scheduled programming — Lawrence Welk marathon, anyone? — to document the topic with an excellent news segment. The segment recently aired on Need to Know, a weekly news program that’s filling in the Friday evening vacancy left by Bill Moyers.

 

The segment is embedded below and certainly worth a look. Since home “downsizing” isn't exactly a new topic here on MNN you might spot some familiar homes and faces including Olympia, Washington's Dee Williams, a noted small house proselytizer/educator and de facto cover girl of the movement. The segment kicks of with an insightful, claustrophobia-inducing tour of her self-built, 84 square foot home, "The Little House," that's "parked" in the backyard of an elderly friend. I last mentioned Williams in a post about Don Vardo, a teeny-weeny backyard office/retreat on wheels that she designed. 

 

For more tiny home goodness, check out MNN's 10 of the smallest homes in the world slideshow, this post on the rockin' Tiny Yellow House video series, and this interview with acclaimed tiny house designer Jay Shafer. And I gotta ask: when it comes down to it, how small is too small for you?