There’s a lot I don’t like about IKEA’s tastes in design, not even including about half of their lighting fixtures (what’s with those layers of scales things that look like exploding insect abdomens? Do people actually buy them and put them in their living rooms?)
But if I want to spot a trend in the way people will be outfitting their homes, and in the actual size of those homes, I’m convinced that IKEA is the place to do it.
But I wasn’t prepared for what IKEA thinks is going to happen in 2012. On the third page of their new catalogue, they pitch a living space that is radical even by my terms: six people (we presume they are young) living together in about 400 square feet, warehoused in bunk beds, crowded around a skinny dining room table and storing their clothing in super-efficient little open closet spaces.
The headline is “Welcome to the world’s smallest ideas.”
I quote from the copy: “…we imagined what would happen if six friends decided to live together in 430 square feet. A home like this might seem like a recipe for disaster…”.
You’re tellin’ me!
But, aside from the gorgeous mostly-white 20-something boy and girl models in the IKEA photo, is the company really targeting that huge group of low-wage earners (read “ex-students, young singles, and immigrants, legal or not”) who have been living six or more to a room for quite a while now, ever since rents on living spaces close to decent (medium or low wage) work pushed way beyond the rates a single person or a couple could afford?
And yes, the increasingly public question of how we can live well in smaller spaces is what brought Joan and me last winter winter to a little house on wheels in Petaluma, California built by Stephen Marshall (littlehouseonthetrailer.com).
Stephen comes to the design and building of small spaces (mostly 100 to 400 square feet) from a different direction than Jay Schafer, certainly the most well-known of the tiny house designers (See my earlier blog and video). Schafer is well on his way to becoming a sort of celebrity in the field (Oprah, etc. etc. to the New Yorker Magazine, July 25, 2011). And with good reason. His designs are (yikes!) really tiny, but are near pitch-perfect in their, as he says, “curb appeal.”
And Tim Guiles, a tiny house builder in Vermont, designs from an aesthetic that is as rigorous, if differently expressed, than Jay’s. (See our blog and video).
Stephen Marshall’s vision is about decent, comfortable design and maximum flexibility. He will build anything you want, even matching the architecture of your big house, from a very small single room studio to a fully equipped home, put it on a trailer and roll it over to your land. As he points out, why build an addition on your house for your teenagers, your aged mother-in-law, or your husband’s new part-time photo-gallery business when we all know none of these spaces will be used into eternity. Or even, perhaps, for the next ten years?
Roll in what you need when you need it, and roll it out, (sell it or rent it) when you are finished. Or maybe even, if you are a young single or couple, and we can change the zoning in campgrounds or on little inexpensive lots, roll in your new little house for way, way less than you would pay (and you wouldn’t because you couldn’t) to build a conventional 2,500 square foot house.
Zoning, of course, is the bugbear, particularly for permanent living spaces on wheels, but Marshall is convinced we will see a slow change over the next 10 or 20 years towards zoning that catches up with the reality of how we are living now. As in, Nuclear Family? Wasn’t that some butter-and-popcorn technicolor dream from the 1950s that flourished on federal policies that encouraged everybody and his wife to buy their own home, and then keep trading up until the family was nuked and by the ’90s we encountered the absurd spectacle of divorced people living alone in 5,000 square foot houses, hunkered down till the repo men came to change the locks?
Marshall has street cred for his ideas. He built a couple of collapsable, movable houses for himself when he was in college, (things he could carry in his VW bus). And then went on to become a fine cabinet maker and builder to the Big House people in northern California, but turned away from that trade to design and build what is obviously his passion. Little houses on wheels.
And by the way, he often uses IKEA cabinetry, and IKEA has taken notice of his work.
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