Living Small – publication New York Times By Tim McKeough
Jan. 26, 2024
The Best Part of Tiny Living? The ‘Freedom We Have Created for Ourselves.’
With a little house in The Hague, a compact getaway on the Italian island of Sardinia and a well-designed camper van, who needs a conventional home?
Who says you have to live in one place? Maybe a few tiny homes would be preferable.
That’s what Robert Losonsky and Edith Wassenaar discovered when they traded a typical home in the Netherlands for several smaller ones, adopting a peripatetic lifestyle — one that prioritizes activities like surfing over work — in the process.
Oddly enough, their embrace of small-scale living began with a hunt for more space.
In 2017, they were living in a 1,500-square-foot apartment in an upscale neighborhood in The Hague. “But we started to work more and more from home,” said Mr. Losonsky, now 54, who had a career in sales at Microsoft, while Ms. Wassenaar, now 49, worked as an independent marketing consultant and business coach.
Inevitably, there were conflicts. Ms. Wassenaar, for example, might want to entertain clients in the apartment while Mr. Losonsky was on a conference call. “So I thought, ‘Well, why don’t we find something small on the side, so we don’t always have to disturb each other?’” he said.
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Tiny Home No. 1: a 19th-Century Fisherman’s Cottage
Because they were avid kite surfers, they decided to look for a place on the North Sea in The Hague and found a 600-square-foot fisherman’s house built in 1878 just steps from the beach. After buying it for 180,000 euros ($190,000) that April, they spent 18 months and 150,000 euros ($158,000) doing a gut renovation with help from Global Architects.
“It was in really bad condition and looked like not much maintenance had been done over the last hundred years,” said Arthur S. Nuss, the firm’s owner.
So they eliminated the walls that divided the house into multiple cramped rooms and proceeded to create an open interior with a beachy vibe: plastered walls, micro-cement floors, rustic wood beams and a small sitting area anchored by a wood stove.
To minimize the presence of the kitchen, which doubles as a dining space, they concealed the refrigerator and oven beneath a staircase leading up to the single bedroom. They also added wood-fiber insulation, new windows and solar panels on the roof to make the home more energy efficient.
When the renovation was finished, the couple were so pleased with their new compact living space, its proximity to the beach and its friendly neighborhood that they arrived at an unexpected conclusion: They wanted to live there all the time.
Tiny Beach House
“That’s how the downsizing started,” Ms. Wassenaar said. “We started living in the small place and renting out the bigger home in the posh neighborhood.”
Mr. Losonsky added: “The funny thing is that we left almost everything behind in the old home. We could hardly take any cupboard or any desk because it wouldn’t fit. We literally left our old life behind and completely re-evaluated what was really important to us.”
Before long, Mr. Losonsky, who had bought the couple’s old apartment before meeting Ms. Wassenaar and had paid off the mortgage, came to another realization: With rent coming in and few expenses, he no longer needed to work. He retired in late 2019, just before turning 50.
Inspired by surfers who travel around Europe chasing waves in camper vans and buses, they soon decided that they also needed wheels. Click here to read the full article…
