There they are. Eight wooden structures, barely larger than shipping containers, were hoisted onto the roof of the Kopermolen shopping center in Leiden. On top they have a sloping dormer window with a square window. They appear to be open binoculars, all aimed at the treetops in the neighborhood park across the street, as if they were birdwatching huts.
They are tiny houses. Placed last spring by a real estate company, and rented for 864.66 euros per month to singles and couples selected from hundreds of candidates. This project is not exactly what you imagine with tiny houses. Not an idyllic eco-village hidden in nature or on an urban fringe, off-grid, self-sufficient, obstinately turning its back on consumer society. No, here they are literally on top of commerce.
Intriguing. Also because we are here in the Merenwijk, where I grew up. In the late 1970s, this was one of the first ‘cauliflower neighborhoods’, which promised a new form of use of space in a time of housing shortage. In the current housing crisis it seems inevitable that we will have to settle for fewer square meters. But if you believe the tiny house movement, that’s not a bad thing at all. Limitation is actually an enrichment! ‘Living small, living big’, the unofficial motto of the movement, I also heard in the D66 campaign come by.
Can less indeed be more? This Leiden project is suitable for researching that, because I think it is right on a border. You notice the possibilities for a way of downsizing that actually enriches. At the same time you also see the dangers here.
I reach the mini houses via wide stone steps, marble white. On either side are terraced plant beds, with only a few tufts of greenery, through which an irrigation system of black hoses snakes. The tiny houses are located in two streets, with gaps of one meter between them.
I meet Robinson von Grumbkow and Olivier Schouwenburg, both 30. They exchanged an 80 square meter flat for their wooden house, which is more than half the size: 32 square meters. They had wanted to live in a tiny house for a long time. “We tried them out while traveling. That minimalist way of life suits us. For example, we followed the YouTube channel Never Too Small,” says Robinson von Grumbkow.
350 motivation letters
Not an anonymous flat, but your own place, in the green. Sustainable, responsible, and as part of a collective, that’s what attracted them. The landlord asked interested parties what expertise they would bring with them and how they would shape this together. 350 motivation letters, they were among the lucky ones. “Olivier is a tree caretaker, I am a yoga teacher. Apparently we fit in completely.”
A picture. That’s what tiny houses are. You see the tightest huts decorated as if they were palaces of happiness. On Never Too Small on Instagram, and also in newspaper columns or on feel-good TV programs Inside out young adults rejoice about contact with nature, being freed from junk and ballast, the joy of the collected rainwater, the delights of the compost toilet.
It involves a complete lifestyle. As a young adult, you might almost think there is something wrong with you if you dream of a townhouse instead of working as a beekeeper in Portugal, protecting sea turtles in Costa Rica or doing seasonal work on an organic vineyard in Tuscany. Remote co-work. The digital nomad those are of life lives: home is where you park it.
For example on the roof above the Hema. “We are not anarchists,” says Robinson. “We simply pay eight hundred dollars in rent every month.” The three of them recently started living there. Their daughter hangs in a baby carrier on Olivier’s stomach. The birth announcements are still on the table in the kitchen/living room.
They had to throw away a lot of stuff during the move, but that felt nice in the end. Olivier Schouwenburg: “With everything we asked the question whether we were really going to use it, whether it was necessary for our lives. We now have less stuff, but nicer and better ones.”
Less is more. It is difficult to define exactly what the cause is, but intuitively you will immediately recognize it if the minimization is done correctly. Here you will notice a warm, living homeliness. Cosy, energetic. There is a beautiful Oriental cupboard. The wooden walls feel pleasant. Tidy, but by no means sterile.
Double role
The tiny house architecture is inspired by the Japanese aesthetic principle of shibui. Such an untranslatable word that refers to refined simplicity that nevertheless conceals deep insight and technical skill. The single-haired brush. It is related to the Renaissance idea of sprezzaturaseemingly careless perfection. The effortlessness of an Olympic skater on the ice after years of training.
This summer I slept with my family on a campsite in a similar house near Paris. The first night it felt ingenious. A cutting board turns the hob into a work surface. Stair steps appear to be sliding drawers. A sofa radiates like a radiator. The shower cabin becomes a toilet, the sink becomes a sink. What does not have a double role is at least collapsible, extendable or pull-out. Clothes rails popping out of cracks. A dance of functions, in a house the size of a coach.
But the second evening it became cramped, and we mainly felt each other’s presence. Pushing into the shower stall. Take turns climbing the ladder to the sleeping loft. I missed the kitchen at home where the door can be closed.
“It just fits here now,” says Robinson. “But I have no idea how that will work when our daughter grows up. And the houses here are very close together. We always have to keep the net curtains closed, because many people walk past and look inside with curiosity.”
When is saving space ‘shibui’ and when is it simply arranging and shelving? Robinson and Olivier consciously chose this, others were happy that they could finally get a home.
Such as Shahroch Ramez (21), branch manager at Domino’s in the shopping center below. He had wanted to live on his own for a long time, but the waiting list for regular social housing was too long. He pays quite a lot of money, he said in a report Broadcasting West, but that’s what he’s willing to do. “Especially in this housing market, you can be happy that you get something.”
Urban living
In The Hague, my current place of residence, new towers near the station attract residents with the ‘urban living concept’, studios of the same size (read: small). In the Laak district there are ‘iLofts’ of forty square meters. In all major cities, young adults are under the guise of urban living cooped up. And not just them. As long as the number of single-person households peaks, it pays to build such towers.
Here the shrinkage is anything but shibui. Square footage has been bluntly amputated, and everything is streamlined along the same mold, ready to stack endlessly. Less is really just less here. Efficiency does not equal pleasant simplicity. The tiny houses at the shopping center are already threatening to move in that direction. You can easily see how this will become a formula that can be rolled out across the hundreds of local shopping centers in our country.
Which brings me back to my philosophical question. When is less actually more? Amputation and rapid scaling is not minimalist as the tiny house movement originally intended, as an alternative to ‘bigger is better‘.
In America it started in the late 1990s with ‘Not So Big House’, a living concept by architect Sarah Susanka, who also returned to the core with smart architectural interventions. Why did people want a ‘formal dining room‘ and a ‘formal living room‘? Those dining and living rooms with chandeliers, only used for festivities, could be deleted.
By European standards, the Not So Big House is still a fairly spacious single-family home: 140 to 230 square meters. But the principle is clear: first choose what is the core and delete everything that you barely use. That was Susanka’s interpretation of ‘shibui’.
Elegant, could be the Dutch translation, as in: an ‘elegant solution.’ Slender columns that seemingly effortlessly support a large building volume, such as the Venetian Doge’s Palace. A complex problem, overcome with simple interventions.
Nightmare
Sellers of small prefab houses like to boast about research that shows that one in five Dutch people is interested in this, but the number of permanently inhabited mini houses remains negligible. An overview Tiny House Netherlands shows 89 projects, plus 36 in advanced stages. There are real gems among them, but the number remains, well, staggering tiny.
You hear everywhere about the biggest obstacle: legislation and regulations. “The permits are a bureaucratic nightmare. It seems as if the regulations are specifically designed to discourage the little guy,” writes Tiny House blogger Nina van der Velden.
“Park that dream,” said one Enschede architect recently in Tubantia.
You would also like a little more elegance in the design of the regulations. The rental allowance system makes it lucrative for the real estate industry to create large complexes full of single-person cells: residents receive housing allowance for this. The rules discourage the construction of housing where people learn to live together, such as student houses. The new cabinet wants to scrap rules to build faster. The coalition agreement talks about limiting the role of the aesthetic committees, permit-free topping, and easier splitting. But who monitors spatial quality? The Association of Dutch Architectural Firms (BNA) recently warned about this. Let’s ensure that both the rules and the space remain elegant. Don’t blindly reduce, but rearrange in a smart way.
Elegance is a way to overcome scarcity by rearranging it. That is a principle that can be applied more broadly. It’s in the cucina povera – simple ingredients, prepared in the tastiest way – in Renaissance architecture, or in haiku: conveying a complex world in three lines.
Sheltered
When I pass my old street in the Merenwijk, the Kraaiheide, one comes to mind. ‘My birth street / everything has become smaller / except the tree.‘ Those lines, by Ria Giskes-Pieters, are on a wall in The Hague where I often cycle past.
Elegance has roots in Latin elegere: select. That’s where it starts. First select the living essence. Living means feeling sheltered and connected to your neighbors, a green outdoor space. Something like that. In that respect, you are in the right place here in the Merenwijk. A winding street plan around residential areas, which branched off from a central ring road. The human scale, lots of greenery: the ideals of the cauliflower district did not differ essentially from those of the tiny house movement.
My parents no longer live there, but our corner house is still there, next to a playground that now indeed looks absurdly small, surrounded by tall trees. Parents never supervised but were always nearby. Low-traffic without ‘car guest’ signs. In later Vinex districts you can feel the drawing board underneath the street plan. Here, groves, ditches and squares seemed not designed but grown.
You can reduce the private domain, but then you have to increase the collective space. Then less becomes more. Tiny houses are in danger of missing out if we dump them as fill on residual lots and the roofs of shopping centers.
The project on the Kopermolendak is on the brink. There is outdoor space, but not very much. The idea that everyone works together still needs to be given more shape. Robinson: “We are still working on the communal garden, it would be great if that really happens this spring.”
The houses smaller, the trees bigger. Maybe feeling at home is indeed that simple. Do Robinson and Olivier feel at home in their tiny house? They look at each other. Then Olivier says: “I especially feel at home with you.”
