Music and Cats

This petite house had her debut last month at the International Builders’ Show in Florida. By many accounts, she was the belle of the ball; developers from all over the country expressed interest in using her plans for camps, hunting retreats and high-end beach communities. All of those options miss the point for which she was designed. This is Katrina Cottage 1, among the first built products to come out of the Mississippi Renewal Forum’s work last fall in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. This is affordable emergency housing.

At 308 square feet (22′ x 14′), this little house is the same size as a temporary FEMA trailer. But don’t let those wheels fool you. While she was placed on a trailer to be hauled to Florida for the Builders’ Show, this house is intended as a permanent structure. When installed on a foundation of concrete footings, she is designed to withstand hurricane-force winds. This prototype was constructed in a Mississippi barn in under three weeks, and cost less than $35,000 to build (about the same price as a FEMA trailer).

The floor plan is quite simple: the front door opens into a main living area, with a small kitchen and a bathroom along one side. At the back of the house, a small bedroom holds two pairs of bunk beds (built with lots of storage below the lower bunk) and a small closet. The large front porch, with built-in benches along two sides, serves as additional living space. If you’d like to see the plan for yourself, head on over to Cusato’s website, and click on Plan Options.

Frankly, the basic design of this cottage is unremarkable. Faced with the same program and constraints, many a good residential architect or designer would create similar plans. But in this little house, as in all good design, God is in the details. The New Urbanists involved in the Mississippi Renewal Forum generated an extensive pattern book documenting the proportions and details of traditional coastal Mississippi houses, and architect Marianne Cusato has detailed the exterior of this cottage in keeping with these patterns. (For an example of a small house not so carefully designed, take a look at the first house built by Habitat for Humanity in Pearlington, MS. Habitat does great work with limited resources and much unskilled labor, but design is definitely not their highest priority.) Thanks to the large windows, the interior of the cottage is bright and airy; the interior finishes and trimwork are what you’d expect to see in larger, more expensive houses.

Neither is building tiny houses something new. Jay Schafer has been designing, building and selling charming very small houses for almost 10 years. Schafer builds each of his houses to the specifications of the buyer; his are custom tiny houses. Katrina Cottage 1 is designed to be mass-produced, using industry-standard construction techniques and commonly available materials. Cottages like this could be popping up all along the Gulf coast in a matter of weeks. (Almost six months after Katrina, there should already be lots of little houses like this… but I’m not in the mood for a full-fledged rant today.)

According to Cusato, “The story here isn’t that a few people built a cute house that a lot of people want to hug, but that we’re going to change the way we deal with emergency and affordable housing throughout the United States.”

Like most architects I know (myself included), Marianne Cusato is an optimist. Let’s hope she’s also right. Because really, wouldn’t a village of these little houses be a vast improvement over a trailer park?

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