The ruthlessness of tiny living
MY HUSBAND and I share a 45s q u a r e - m e t r e apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We inhabit a “micro apartment”, or what is sometimes called a tiny house. This label is usually proudly applied to dwellings less than 150 square metres, according to Wikipedia. We are unwittingly on a very small bandwagon, part of a growing international movement.
But deep inside the custom closets and under the New Age Murphy beds, the pro-petite propaganda has hidden some unseemly truths about how the other half lives. No one writes about the little white lies that help sell this new, very small American dream.
On the inside, we have found small not so beautiful after all. Like the silent majority of other middling or poor urban dwellers in expensive cities, we are residents of tiny homes not by design, but because it is all our money can rent.
Tiny houses are booming. The movement, whose origins fans often link in spirit all the way to Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, became increasingly popular after the 2008 housing crash. Living small has come to signal environmental mindfulness.
Our apartment in Cambridge was built in 1961, part of an earlier wave of utopian interest in tiny affordable housing. Our space occupies most of the lower third of a two-unit, three-storey building. There is a contiguous row of nine such pairings – pint-size below, family-size above – on our street. The original developer’s vision was that income from renting the lower units could help cover the mortgage for the owners’ homes above.
The most striking feature of our small lives is the unavoidable, domineering presence of the plastic laundry hamper originally bought from Target in 2007. Embarrassing, ordinary objects like the hamper are empowered in small spaces; they become tyrants. In a larger home, this perfectly functional item might recede quietly into a laundry room.
Life in our tiny home is characterised above all by shabbiness. Like the apartment’s pervasive, undomesticateable dust bunnies, the threadbare feeling grows and grows simply because it already exists.
No one warns you that everything is more concentrated in a tiny house. Our things are ageing faster than they did in their previous homes. We sit on our lone couch more hours a day than in any previous dwelling. The cushions are fading, the springs sagging, the corners fraying. Our rug is balding along our daily paths, starkly revealing repetitive routines: back and forth to the coffee machine, to the couch, to the sink, to the couch. The denudations look like cow paths cut through sage brush – invasive affronts on the landscape. Everything in our tiny house is worked over more, used harder.
Here, even smells take up space. We once made a meal that called for caramelising three pounds of onions. For hours the onions melted in their pan. Technically they were taking up less and less space, but somehow they intruded more.
In a tiny house, the smell of slowly sweated onions is an inescapable, cloyingly rich aroma; a scent to drive men – and women – mad.
The eau de onion spread to everything. It clung especially to the moist bathroom towels, and to the laundry drying in the bedroom. We were never clean again. Fresh from the shower, we immediately smelled of onions – of tiny house. For weeks, smelling like old onions became one of our micro lives’ certainties. The scent’s preferred repository, I eventually learned, was my New Age, polyester sports bra.
“It smells like onion,” my husband had certified weeks later. “That doesn’t seem like a good thing to wear.”
I said, “I can’t not wear it.” And that was true. I did wear it, but the bra’s coolly advertised moisture-wicking technology seemed designed to activate the old onions. I carried the smell with me deep into the city. You can never really leave a tiny house; it goes with you everywhere.