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Some buildings make you feel wonderful. Old train stations, for example. Or, on a smaller scale, some private homes can provide that grand, central sense of well-being. You might think living in a narrow house would make you feel restricted rather than wonderful – but it doesn’t.
I have lived in a nine-foot-wide house for almost a decade, and it has had a liberating impact on the way I think, feel and act.
Like Edna St. Vincent Millay, the American poet who received her Pulitzer Prize in 1923 while living in a nine-foot-wide house in New York, and Margaret Mead, the American cultural anthropologist who lived in the same narrow house in the 1930s – I appreciate the feels-wonderful-quality of my unusual urban home.
When I bought the house nine years ago, I thought of it as the Smart car of the real estate world. Now, I think of it as the Rolls-Royce of affordable housing. It makes me feel empowered with home ownership – without having access to exorbitant wealth.
In architectural terms, my 1,000-square-foot house is a small, simple and quiet success built by Doris and Oriano Belusic, a blind couple who had the vision to see the value in a super-narrow lot. Their creative ideas were in line with the principles espoused by Vitruvius, the Roman writer and architect who declared in the 1st century BC that a building should be solid, beautiful and useful. It’s a subjective assessment, but I see my narrow house as all three.
Living in an affordable narrow house in an urban landscape is about way more than just being able to walk or take the bus instead of driving a car. The true value of my home is not in its structure, but in the fibre of the community relationships it has enabled me to foster. Living in it has given me a tremendous amount of freedom. I’ve logged more than 3,000 hours of volunteer work with several community agencies in the past nine years. I couldn’t do that when I was constantly taking care of the myriad of responsibilities attached to a much larger home.
The reduced floor area has not meant reduced comfort – quite the opposite, in fact. My single-family, on-the-ground dwelling with a small garden in the back and a pleasant reading courtyard in the front gives me the compact simplicity of a condo or townhouse without the strata fees, committee meetings and rules that come with those types of housing.
Some people see the lack of storage space as a drawback. I view it as a perfect check-and-balance system to keep my “stuff” from governing my life. My bedroom closet is about the size of two old-fashioned phone booths – not much bigger than the clothes cupboard I shared with my two sisters when we were growing up. If my closet starts to get crowded, I fill a box and head to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society to make a donation.
Remember the useful little postwar houses built from the 1940s to the 1960s and still found in neighbourhoods all over North America? By contrast, the bloated houses of the 1970s and onward may ultimately be remembered for their counterpointing uselessness, with their dining rooms that are seldom dined in, their living rooms that seldom get lived in, and “great rooms” that aren’t really great at all.
In decades to come, narrow houses may be remembered as the affordable climate-change houses, chosen by people who wanted to move away from the North American mindset of unlimited land and plentiful energy.
My humble, narrow house has dignity and inspires creativity, making me feel – for the first time in my life – that I have enough. I am not rich, but I feel rich in my home. My life is full and feels purposeful. I am satisfied.
In our consumer-driven culture, we are rarely encouraged to feel this way. My home has enabled me to have more control over my time and to develop healthy living habits. I sleep well, eat well, exercise and get fresh air – because I have more time. At 60, I like knowing I won’t be spending the last third of my life rotely maintaining a house to some chimerical standard. I am free to continue to learn, grow and satisfy my many curiosities.
I know what you are thinking: There has to be a downside. But there isn’t. I have plenty of space to entertain friends, to exercise and even to dance. The first party I had was a “welcome to the world” for my new nephew. A dozen family members had a blast passing the baby around at a lunch feast. The most recent celebration was to show off my wonderful Christmas present: the 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary. With friends, I feted the biggest of dictionaries in the smallest of houses.
North Americans need a new narrative about “home.” The budding story should be less about spending hard-earned money on questionable home-improvement “needs” promoted by the house-porn spreads in weekend newspapers and more about stocking our homes with vitality that nourishes and frees us.
The world is too full of intriguing curiosities and beckoning nature to imprison ourselves in cavernous homes, bereft of soul.
Thelma Fayle lives in Victoria.