Sweating the Small Stuff
With space at a premium, Budd carefully planned every item that would come into the cottage. “I made a list of everything it had to accommodate, down to pots and pans,” he says. After winnowing out the chaff, he searched for the smallest practical version of each item that remained. The kitchen features a refrigerator with a 24-inch by 24-inch footprint, a 24-inch-wide wall oven, a two-burner cooktop, a single dishwasher drawer, and an undercounter clothes washer. A tiny direct-vent propane heater—the home’s only heat source—sits under the stairs by a low closet that holds a small dryer. A tankless water heater hides in a paneled compartment above the bathroom.
The bathroom, despite occupying less than 23 square feet of floor area, “had to look big,” Budd says. “It had to look natural.” A narrow vanity with what Budd calls “the world’s smallest kick space heater” joins a similarly diminutive Italian toilet along one 42-inch-wide wall, freeing the opposite end of the space for a full-size shower stall. A wall-hung cabinet, adapted from a vintage Ebay find, shares space above the lavatory with an awning window and a small swing-arm mirror.
Upstairs, Burgess’s crew expanded the bedroom loft by a critical 6 inches. Meanwhile, Budd sourced a storage bed—“storage is everything here,” he says—that would fit a specialty mattress called a “short queen” because it’s about six inches shorter than the standard version. “It’s meant for luxury RVs,” Budd explains. In a house not much bigger than some RVs, the resulting inches of extra space at the foot of the bed “make all the difference,” he says.
