Posts Tagged ‘cottages’
Thinking a Little Bigger About the Tiny House Thing
I’ve never been much of a fan of the Tiny House movement, which seemed to me to be a solution in search of a problem. Squeezing marginally comfortable living space into something you can haul around with a truck didn’t seem to be much of a design challenge. After all, there’s a whole industry that’s…
Read MoreRemember that Katrina Cottages thing? Whatever happened to that?
This is the second of two parts addressing Hurricane Katrina 10 years after the storm. The first looked at issues in New Orleans. This one focuses on one hoped-for innovation in the storm’s wake in Coastal Mississippi. Right about now, a couple and their two children are getting much-needed affordable housing help via a move…
Read MoreAre We There Yet? Affordability in the ‘New Normal’
Pretty soon we’ll have something like a decade of experience in losing our innocence about housing affordability. Isn’t it about time we got over it? For a good part of the last century, we trained generations of housing consumers and housing enablers to buy and sell into what Chuck Marohn calls a “growth Ponzi scheme.”…
Read MoreCottage Simplicity: Keeping it easy, making it attainable
We talk often here on PlaceShakers about cottage living, as well as drilling down into how to make that happen at home, with conversations like Small Y’all: A Cottage Solution to the Housing Problem and “Pocket Neighborhoods”: Scale Matters. This weekend, strolling through Victoria Beach — an insightful cottage community in Manitoba, Canada — I…
Read MoreThe Data is In: Let the heavy lifting begin
The good news about making the redevelopment of American neighborhoods more responsive to 21st century American needs is that we seem to have a pretty good grasp on the problem: We have a lot more isolated, supersized, energy-sucking housing than we want or can afford. And we have a lot less compact, close-in, energy-efficient neighborhoods…
Read MoreFinally Thinkin’ Small: But can we build on what we’ve learned?
As soon as the destructive path of Hurricane Sandy became evident, I got emails and calls from colleagues who, like me, worked in disaster recovery situations on the Gulf Coast. When the clean-up gets underway, could this be an opportunity for the Eastern Seaboard states to apply some of the rebuilding lessons of the Gulf…
Read MoreThe New Incrementalism
The latest design trend appears to be designing a place to be realized in very gradual stages. Not in terms of planning for phases of development pods, built-out in a predetermined sequence, but about individual lots changing — evolving — over time. Very rarely now are we designing to build immediately for a project’s absolute…
Read MoreOttawa: Lessons from great Canadian urbanism
Ottawa celebrates Canada’s cultural mosaic, its urbanism full of delight and engagement. As with most North American cities, its oldest neighbourhoods have positive lessons for urban design today. This is because much of what makes Ottawa character delightful is illegal in the development bylaws that govern its more auto-centric outskirts. On a recent visit, I…
Read MoreMont-Tremblant: Cottage living in the Canadian Shield
As the second in a three part pictorial series finding inspiration in Canadian urbanism, I’ve been invigorated again by a short stint of cottage living. Which of us hasn’t felt the delightful lightness that comes with downsizing our primary residence? Some of my most carefree years were spent living in an 800 SF cottage in…
Read MoreHardiplank: Get into the groove?
In 2006 I was in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, for a planning event. On display downtown at the time was the prototype Katrina Cottage and a number of us spent one evening there conducting a spontaneous test of its ability to host a party. At some point, I ended up on the porch with a prominent…
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