Designing small and beautiful

Before anyone mixes mud or stacks a bale, the best natural builders spend time with a pencil. A small home that's designed well feels bigger, costs less, and is a joy to live in. A big one designed badly is just a lot of walls to plaster.

Natural materials reward small, thoughtful design. Every square foot of thick wall is hand work, so the fewer you need, the better. And the qualities that make natural homes special (deep sills, curved corners, soft light) are at their best in rooms sized for people, not for furniture showrooms.

Start with how your family lives, not with a room list. Where do you eat? Where do the kids do schoolwork? Where does everyone end up in the evening? Most families spend most of their waking hours in two or three places. Those places deserve the best light and the most care; everything else can be smaller.

1. Rooms that do two jobs. A kitchen with a big table is also the school room and the craft room. A wide hall with shelves is also the library.
2. Build in instead of buying. Benches, shelves and beds built into thick walls take no floor space.
3. Go up a little. A sleeping loft over the bath and bedroom adds space for children without adding foundation or walls.
4. Count the porch. In good weather, a covered porch is a whole extra room for the price of a roof.
5. Plan to grow. Design the first small home so a second wing or a separate studio can join it later.

In the 1970s, architect Christopher Alexander and his colleagues published A Pattern Language, a book of 253 design patterns drawn from places people have loved for centuries. Many of them fit natural homes perfectly. Here are a few of the most useful.

Two more that matter for the whole plan: intimacy gradient (127), which puts the welcoming, public rooms near the door and the private ones deeper inside, and south-facing outdoors (105), which places the house on the north side of its garden and porch so outdoor spaces get the sun.

A home that faces the sun can heat itself for much of the winter. This is called passive solar design, and it costs almost nothing extra if you plan for it from the start.

Here's how these ideas might come together in a cottage of about 360 sq ft inside, plus a sleeping loft: small enough to build as a family, big enough to live in well.

Why it works

1. The cold side works hard. The bathroom and pantry line the north wall, where few windows are needed, and they buffer the living spaces from winter wind.
2. The warm side is for living. The living room, kitchen and porch face south toward the garden from Permaculture Design.
3. Mass meets the sun. The cob bench sits by the stove and in the path of winter sunlight.
4. Room to grow. A second wing could join on the east or west later without blocking any south windows.

A good small home is a gift: easier to build, cheaper to heat, and closer together as a family. With light on two sides of every room, thick walls to sit in, and the winter sun pouring across an earthen floor, it can be the most beautiful place you've ever lived.

Next, we protect that home from its greatest enemy, water, with the foundation and roof every natural building needs.

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