Houses · 04
The Tiny House
One room has light. Everything else in the house is a gallery over it.
5850 square over the walls, 5250 inside — 27.6 m² of ground, and 30.3 m² of floor got out of it because the floor is at seven different heights. Seven pieces, and the plan divides into them exactly with nothing left over.
The sleeping runs north up the west side at grade, with the bathroom standing the full height of the house in the south-west corner. Six risers up out of it is living — the centre and the south-east corner, the one tall room, with the front door in its south wall. One step up to the kitchen, one step on to the dining nook, four risers west from there to the work floor, which hovers over the bed. There are no doors between any of them.
The model
The 3D needs JavaScript, WebGL and a connection. The ledger of the climb beside it needs none of the three, the two drawings below need only the first, and the argument is on this page already.
Look inside
| ±00 M | the whole west side — the bathroom standing all 4500 with no soffit over it, the landing at its door, and sleeping north of that: 4.73 m², 2100 clear |
|---|---|
| +9002 M · 6 R | living — the centre and the SE corner, 9.90 m² and 3600 of air. The front door is here, and no wall window at all |
| +13503 M · 9 R | kitchen — one modulus up, an L of counter under two windows that meet at the corner |
| +18004 M · 12 R | dining — one modulus on again. A nook for two: 1200 × 1050 clear, a canopy dropped to 2100, and 1800 of wardrobe under the floor |
| +240016 R | working — four risers west out of the nook, hovering over the bed and stopping short of the stair. The one plateau that is not a whole modulus up |
| +450010 M · 30 R | the ceiling, and the monitor standing 600 on it over the middle of the plan |
Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom. Download it as OBJ or GLB from the corner of the frame.
The lit room is at the bottom
A small house with one good window usually puts that window at the top and a stair under it, and you climb toward the light. This one does the opposite. The tall lit room is the lowest inhabited floor, and the climb spirals up and away from it — living +900, kitchen +1350, dining +1800, working +2400 — so every plateau in the house looks down into the one room that has light.
That is what makes the difference between a stairwell and a room. A stairwell is circulation with a window at the end of it; here the window is the floor of the house and everything else is a gallery over it. You can see the whole of the inside from any point in it, which is the third of the four claims — the whole house available at once — done by a plan rather than asserted.
It also decides where the storage goes, and the answer falls out rather than being arranged. The two highest plateaus sit over the two deepest voids, so the wardrobe goes under the dining nook at 1800 of full hanging height and the bulk goes under the kitchen at 1350. Nine hundred under the living floor opens off the stair, there is a box under all ten treads, and the six bench faces are six drawer fronts. 17.1 m³ by the geometry file's own arithmetic — all of it reachable standing, and not one litre of it overhead.
You arrive at +900, and go down to bed
The front door is in the living room's south wall, and the living floor is 900 above the ground — so the threshold has to be outside. A landing and six steps climb to it. That is ordinary for a house on a plinth, and it buys something: you arrive into the tall lit room, standing on its floor, with the entire climb of the house visible from the mat.
The consequence on the other side is the better half of the bargain. The only way to the bed and the bathroom is down the stair, which is the reverse of the usual arrangement in a house this size — the private half is the low, quiet, cool half, and the public half is the one with the height and the light in it.
The stair that does it runs west to east along the sleeping room's south edge: six risers, and because it has the full 2250 of the west band to cross, six risers land at a going of 375 rather than 300. That is a noticeably shallower stair than anything else in the house, and it climbs in a slot open all the way to the roof, because the work floor above deliberately stops short of it.
What two windows costs
There are wall windows in the kitchen and on the work floor, and nowhere else. Five of the seven rooms have no window, and that is the brief rather than an oversight — but it has a price and the price is specific.
Living is fine. Its ceiling opening is 3.24 m² over 9.90 m² of floor — a third of the room's own area, open to a monitor glazed on its north and east faces, 2.16 m² of glass. A room lit at that ratio from directly overhead is a bright room. The nook borrows from the centre and through the kitchen's corner glazing. The bed is deliberately dark.
The bathroom is the one that does not survive the reasoning. Standing it the full 4500 gives it a fine tall shower and real volume, but it has no daylight and no openable vent, so it is on mechanical extract alone — and a 4500-high shower room loses a great deal of heat for somewhere you are in for ten minutes. A high slot in its west wall, or a small rooflight at the top of that shaft, fixes both and costs the brief one opening.
Cross-ventilation is the second. Two glazed walls that meet at a corner cannot make a cross draught, so the house has to breathe up through the centre and out of the monitor's top sash. That works, and it is what the tall lit centre is for — but it is one path, not two, and it has not been calculated.
The drawings
Two of them, and neither is an export
The plan and the level ladder are plotted from tiny-house-geometry.js in the browser, on load — the same file the solid above is built from. Not one coordinate in them is typed in, so the drawings and the model are the same numbers drawn two ways.
Sheet 1
The plan at grade
Everything above grade is dashed on it, so one drawing carries the whole house.
Peach: living, the tall lit centre, with the front door in its south wall and the landing and steps outside it. Sage: the bathroom in the SW with its two full-height partitions drawn solid and its door cut at the west end, the landing in front of it, and the plant bay under the living floor beside it. Solid dark: the parapet at the nook and the two rails at the work floor. Dashed accent: the work floor over the bed — note it stops short of the staircase — and the ceiling opening. Dashed grey: the canopy over the nook. Hatched: the two flights, with a box under every tread.
Sheet 2
The ladder
Every level in the house, in millimetres, in risers and in moduli.
The scale on the left is true to the section; the captions beside it are spread evenly and joined back to it by leaders, because eight levels inside 5250 will not carry eight legible captions at their own spacing.
What this is not, yet
A spatial study, published as one — the same standing as the Brahmasthan House and not the same standing as the Body House, which is drawn twenty times and meant to be built from.
- No structure.the work floor spans over the bed on nothing that has been sized
- No site.and the monitor faces north and east, which is an assumption about north that a real site will overturn
- No thermal or daylight arithmetic.including the bathroom and the single ventilation path above
- The plan grew to fit.5250 internal is what a stair inside the sleeping space and a full-height bathroom cost; that is the number to push back on if the house is too big
One more, and it is about people rather than millimetres: the work floor is open on two sides, which is right for the light and wrong for the sound if two people live here and one of them is working.