“How Large

Is This House?!”
Shay Salomon

ow many square feet?!” Ianto’s voice trembles in

“H mock disbelief as he repeats my question, and then
continues, “What do you guess?” People guess 300, 500 square
feet, but how are you going to measure? From where are you go-
ing to measure? The inside of the walls? The outside? This isn’t
a box, so you can’t measure it as a box.”
“Well, if you superimposed circles on it...,” I start to inter-
ject. “There isn’t a Cartesian form in it,” he insists. “You see,
this is the whole issue of Natural Building: the old rules don’t
count, the numbers don’t count. It all has to do with feelings, at-
titude, spirit. Things that you can’t quantify.” He pauses for
breath, and finally gives in: “We tried to fit this building in on
less than 130 round feet.”
In 1989 Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley began living in their
first “cob cottage.” In 1993, they joined Michael Smith to found
the Cob Cottage Company. That same year, Ianto and Linda be-
gan work on their current residence, the “Heart House,” a small
cottage in Oregon that contains spaces for cooking, dining,
“desking,” sleeping and entertaining a few guests, arranged in a
heart-shaped floor plan. This surprising structure is much more
spacious than measuring tapes would lead one to believe.
Maybe that’s because it is literally spacious: a tiny home filled
with many little spaces.
When Ianto first began designing cob cottages, he thought
he had become a brilliant designer. Then he saw that everyone
else who was designing with cob had equally brilliant designs.
He’s decided now that it is the medium itself that leads the
builder to good design, because it’s free-form, wet, and is
slowly hand-sculpted as the builder works. “You could do it
with any material, but cob begs to become a house that fits like a
glove, not like a box.” That’s his first principle of small-house
design: “Build gloves, not boxes. Wrap the space around the ac-
tions of your body, rather than building a neutral space and try-
ing to fill it.” Each space in this tiny house fits the body. Nothing
is wasted. The kitchen, designed so the cook never needs to do
more than turn, is a good example.
A house that fits like a glove has no rectilinear spaces, and
thus no square feet. “I’m fascinated by the psychology of round
feet. I’m not sure why, but it appears round feet are about twice
the size of square feet,” Ianto claims. This is the second princi-
ple: “The bottom line is, curved walls make buildings seem big-
ger: sine curves, spirals, platoids. The trick is to turn off your
conscious mind and let your intuition take over, even as you lay
the foundation.”
Ianto’s third principle is contrary to some modern architec-
tural teaching: To use a small space well, divide it up. Use half
Page 22 NaturalLifeMagazine.com
walls, a change in flooring; use edges and shelves, things that di-
vide without closing off. Linda points out in their house: “You
enter under a high ceiling, but then step down into a low sitting
area here, or climb the ladder to sleep or write – two separate ac-
tivities which themselves are at two different levels. Just having
this tiny partition which separates the kitchen from the tele-
phone, for instance, makes all the difference.”
Linda calls each of these spaces an embracing space. “In the
kitchen we embrace kitchen activities. The kitchen forms one
half of the heart shape, while the ‘snug’ (their name for the
curved sitting area) creates the other half of the heart. It em-
braces us. The same form is echoed upstairs. That way we live in
a nest, a soft container.”
Because the house is so intimate and close, they used soft
finishes. A rough plaster can be beautiful in a large public space,
but here everything you touch is smooth: no rough six-by-six
beams, nothing sharp to bump into. Everything is rounded and
soft.
Ianto prefers low ceilings in a small space and short doors,
saying, “As you come into a small space you register it in pro-
portion to what you just went through. The shorter you can
make the door, the bigger the space seems, because you squeeze
through, like coming out of the neck of a bottle.” He adds,
“They just made it illegal to install public doors shorter than six
feet eight inches. We purposely cut ours down.” Ianto adds,
“Never put two doors into a small house. It changes a ‘being-in’
space into a ‘going-through’ space, which will never be a peace-
ful place to rest.”
 Photo by Nigel Valdez from Little House on a Small Planet

passes by. The scene is always interesting, chang-

ing. And we watch it from our snug, little house.”

Epilogue:
Linda and Ianto lived primarily in the Heart
Photo by Shay Salomon

House for about ten years, and then in 2005

moved to a nearby area where their colleagues
One special feature is the and students have begun constructing a small vil-
cool box, set into the wall of the lage of tiny cob cottages. - NL -
kitchen. It uses the cool air of
the Oregon night, and the cold
stored in the thermal mass of the
walls, to keep yogurt, cheese
and leftovers moderately cool.
A simple screen on the exterior This article is reprinted from Little House on
keeps the animals out. Thick cob walls lend themselves to a Small Planet by Shay Salomon (published by The
shelves, nooks and generous window seats. Lyons Press, Guilford, CT.) Shay Salomon is an au-
Builders of small, wood-heated homes run into the problem thor, an educator and a builder in the field of natural
of how to place the stove so that people won’t bump into it. The construction methods. She is also a co-founder of
Heart House solves this problem by having a down-draft the Small House Society, along with Nigel Valdez
“rocket stove,” made of two steel barrels – one for the firebox (who took the photographs in Little House on a Small
and one for the heat exchanger – buried along with its long flue, Planet), Jay Shafer and Gregory Paul Johnson (who
in the built-in cob bench. A fire is built in the firebox, the ex- now serves as coordinator of the organization, living
and working in a 140-square- foot house custom de-
haust gases recombust in the second chamber, and then the ex-
signed by Shafer.) The Small House Society pro-
haust passes through the flue in the cob bench, leaving all its
motes the research and development of affordable
warmth in the house before it exits. The exhaust coming out of and ecologically responsible small houses. At the
the chimney is almost cool; the heat stays inside the house. The time of establishing the Small House Society in
stove heats the house so efficiently, they haven’t made any ef- 2002, Shay and Nigel were traveling, collecting floor
fort to cover their windows properly. “With a small space, you plans, stories and photographs of the small house
can get away with a lot less efficiency,” says Linda. movement. They worked on the project for about
Windows are plentiful, and the south wall is mainly glass. seven years in total and the result is Little House on
“Light is important here in Oregon,” Linda explains. “Without a Small Planet – a self-help, home-improvement
this glass it would feel very enclosed and small. We are always guide for people who want to increase their happi-
able to see the outdoor room, so the courtyard becomes part of ness by living in less space.
the house. We watch the outside, see the rain or a snake that
NaturalLifeMagazine.com Page 23