Seattle architect builds simple home inspired by own bio

[Music] so we lived in that thing which is 550 square feet for four and a half years that gave us all these ideas about living with less because it had so little space you had to pick exactly what you needed and that was it we loved it it was it was just a small cabin on the beach and then we bought the lamp next door and then the idea came to me that maybe we should build something that is so minimal modest first of all to fit the site but second of all just as an experiment and how one could live in a very simple way the house is 18 feet wide it's a very narrow house it's sort of the iconic house shape it had to be this high because we wanted to use the top of that white box as the living space so it's dropped as low as we can make it and the key to this thing is that that white box is offset and it provided us with an entranceway that was more interesting and also a side place so that narrow slot extends throughout the whole house because we wanted this house to be small it also had to be very limited in its visual noise so all the materials are simple as possible the roof and the walls are all the same material the only intervention is this white box all the basic program elements are enclosed in this white box the bedroom the bathroom the stairwell they're all in the kitchen they're all enclosed in this white element so that contains everything it organizes the whole house it also goes through the floor and it shows up as part of the foundation so it penetrates all the way down the entry is right adjacent to the master bedroom it's a very awkward space so instead of putting a or in we decided to use curtains which mitigates the problem needing some privacy but it keeps this space open which is kind of I think a relief for the entry it makes this space more special I think plus when you're in that bedroom an all-white room is very very calming and those are those are old Singer sewing machine lamps and we repurpose them and put a steel base on them if you walk through here you can start to sight down in both directions this leads you to the outside that continues throughout the whole house oh well it's interesting because this is a sliver it's a slimmer but it's so important to relieve the pressure in the house so this little escape is like a steam escape valve and then we have a powder room master bathroom and we've separated the sink from the toilet that may shower just to give it a sense of relief and more interest than just containing it all in one space that's a salvaged shower door and each time you go all the way in the reference I think to the long narrow space becomes changing you also have this vertical space so this is a very dynamic little space surprise yeah and it just happens because you moved the white box off Center and then the kitchen is an open end part of this white box but that had to be white so that it related to the box the white container within this space houses all the all the program requirements so all you have is negative space around it which is really extending the idea of a simple house it's not just a room these little wooden blocks are just blocks of fir that have split and they're not really sanded that well and also just making space proportional to the human body I think that's the most important thing so this is a very inexpensive way to make an open stairway it's a wall with suspended threads this is an old-school roll up blackboard and then I love this space from the landing you see another dimension to this slot space so interesting because you know people often just want these up every last little well that space is almost more important to me than the rest of the spaces and mouth yeah these are things that I've collected over the years that are sort of like my connection to history to the past these are all forms or spinning metal so this is a wind speed indicator that's the old tape measure that's yeah that's one they but I really do like the old stuff I mean when's the last time you saw a wristwatch as a compass they're things I think had an intrinsic value that I find hard to find today and the things that we buy off-the-shelf I mean this look at the the screws on this thing it's made very very well and it has a nice feel to it this array of jars this guy had a collection of seeds he died in his estate wanted to get rid of they're the most interesting things and they also represent this guy see there's a lot there's a lot to look at this but you know it's really kind of arresting bussiness here because you don't have a lot of things you come after thanks her little downstairs era see well I don't know whether or not it was real or not but since I was raised in a concentration camp for the first six months my theory is that we had nothing there and so I became obsessed with little things Emer theory I was at a camp in Idaho called Minidoka and it was a tarpaper barracks and I think there were long shed buildings much like these things are there were long buildings you know I don't know how many families lived in them but they were all partitioned off you had one window and a stove area and I think they were basically curtains that set rated you from one one family to the other and maybe it's because there was nothing there that the visuals I wanted to make everything as simple as I could I don't even know now but you know you kind of think back to some of the things that you kind of consider when you're thinking about everything in life and you wonder how that experience was affecting you it probably was so this is my wife's moon moon viewing porch because the moon comes up there and it's just a great portion look at the moon looking even down this way even even the coat hooks are part of the designs sometimes you really don't need a big coat closet this prevents a lot of people from bringing a lot of stuff I try to go back to the simplest thing and usually resonates in a way that say okay that's enough okay let's go down yeah I do think geometry is very important we could have made the house longer but we would have had to take that tree out we were thinking about how much we should prune the tree and actually we we love the fact that there's more branches than one would expect but it's also the coolest room outside because the branches provide protection from the wind this is one of my favorite little rooms here yeah it's it's an outside room yeah a lot of the reason for the color of the wood is because it matches the bark of the trees and then the fact that there's no coverings on the windows and the windows are minimal you do get a sense that you are sitting in that in the trees I mean it's very very special though to live so close to a tree you know it's like like being up in a tree house the whole house is built on a two foot grid so everything has a portion and an alignment even vertically as well as horizontally that line goes all the way up and across and it lands in the center of that column and I think that contributes to the sense of calm also where things because they're aligned and justified you don't have to sort of justify it in your mind it's already done for you and it's another way of eliminating visual noise see this grain when we made these windows we made them out of wood that is structural wood so it was not a real refined piece of wood but this grain on this grain or this coin they all feel like they're all part of the same block of wood and because of that it looks like the windows could have been carved out of the wall see oh yeah it's just it's just beautiful now the light I don't know oh yes see that the tree starts at least to animate in a completely different way I think what we try to do we eliminate all the visual noise we can so all the plug placements all the little accessories all of those things are considered and they're made to disappear or blend in with its surroundings because that they affect you visually you don't necessarily recognize them but people do recognize the fact when they're not there when they disappear in their mind all of a sudden they wonder why it feels so calm in here because there is no accessories to cloud your eye you need to have places where you could go where you understand what simplicity will give you back I think part of it you should find a place where you can understand what little you could live with and then try to do that and you need cost reinforce but we live in a society that is not giving you any time to think about it you can order anything from Amazon too quickly on a whim and then you wonder why you needed it so we are experiencing the house and understanding again what it was like to live in a small house

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 1,381,800

Keywords: tiny home, small space, small home, tiny house, home size, simplicity, simple living, seattle, west seattle, washington state, japanese american, US internment camp, idaho internment camp, minidoka internment camp, simple architecture, george suyama, Suyama Peterson Deguchi, fishing cabin, simple home

Id: LTN6jzEHICQ

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 08 2017