Could you live in a tiny house?

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/oct/26/could-you-live-in-a-tiny-house

Version 0 of 1.

Hello and welcome to Part 1,285,746 in our occasional series: I Think It’s Time To Start Taking My Tablets Again. For a house is on sale in Islington for £275,000. “How very reasonable,” you might think, if you had been sealed in a lead-lined bunker for the past 40 years and hadn’t heard anything about the London property market. “I wonder whether it’s two or three bedrooms and the garden is big enough for a dog?”

No. No, it is none of these things. It is one storey and two rooms. Not two bedrooms. Two rooms. And then only if we define the term generously. There is a sitting room-cum-kitchen and toilet-and-shower-perilously-close-to-each-other room below, and a bed on a mezzanine above. That is it, squeezed in between two of what one tries and fails not to call proper houses. For £275,000.

On the upside, that bunker of yours is probably worth a fortune now.

Interest in tiny homes has increased greatly over the past few years. For some people, it is an interest in beautiful bits of bespoke ingenuity, built by specialist architects and sold to those with an active interest in living with as little stuff and as little impact on the built and wider environment as possible. These can be off-grid, self-sustaining, portable or fixed, and, depending on the location, each has its own set of regulatory pros and cons.

Put those dull practicalities aside though and you can easily while away hours on the likes of tinyhouseuk.co.uk, nomadmicrohomes.com, microcompacthome.com, tinyhouseblog.com and the other hundreds of similar websites that have sprung up in the past five or 10 years, dreaming tiny, streamlined, apocalypse-proof dreams. In the US the “tiny house movement” (a small house usually being defined as one offering less than 400 sq ft of space), which offers inspiration and practical information on navigating zoning laws and planning restrictions, is gaining greater traction as ever more people choose to downsize for economic or ecological reasons.

In the UK, it’s less of a movement than a frenzied pack of victims of the crazily distorted, government-aggravated madness of the property market. Those who can afford to buy something – anything, even if it’s a bit of infill whose not-quite-bedroom you literally reach by standing on the kitchen units (they form the first step of the stairs in the Islington house) – do so in order to get a toe on the ladder. Or, in order to rent it (tax-efficiently, of course – see government-aggravation above) to those who can’t even see the ladder through a fog of average-wagery and debt.

The Islington shoebox with a front door is now under offer. By the time you read this, it will probably have been let a dozen times, spruced up and sold on for £300,000-plus. Get that bunker valued. You know it makes sense.