There's nothing trashy about Gregory Kloehn's Brooklyn
pied-a-terre: a live-in dumpster that sleeps two with ease, hosts
impromptu barbecue parties and sports its own sundeck.
It's the California artist's tin-can contribution to the tiny-house
movement that's prompting many Americans to ask if bigger really is
better when it comes to having a roof over your head.
"On the street, when it's all closed up, if you don't know about
it, you think it's a garbage can," said Kloehn, 42, as he invited
AFP to step inside for a house tour.
"They don't know I'm in here sleeping... Even with the barbecue
going outside, chicken wings grilling, people just walk by. They
don't see it as a home."
Kloehn had already turned 20-foot shipping containers into housing
units when he thought up the idea of doing likewise with the steel
garbage receptacle known to Britons as a skip.
"What I did is that I bought a brand new dumpster and just started
going to town," he said.
"I was going to make it a little rougher at first, but then I
started and I thought, 'Let's put in some granite counter tops.
Let's put in some hardwood floors. Let's really make it luxurious
and liveable -- really take everything a regular home has and throw
it into this small a space."
You enter Kloehn's dark-green crash pad -- his home back in Oakland
is rather more conventional -- through a Dutch door with an affixed
minibar that is well-stocked with whiskey and vodka.
To the right is the galley-style kitchen with smooth granite
countertop, sink, single-burner gas stove, concealed icebox and a
hood fashioned out of an old wok.
Running around the edge is a cushioned sofa, upholstered in black
vinyl, with backs and seats that lift off to reveal storage space
and a marine toilet connectable to a city sewage system.
There's definitely no room to swing a cat, but twist a crank and up
goes the ceiling to reveal a pair of eyebrow windows to provide
natural light and some welcome headroom.
Welded onto the exterior is a shower and the gas barbecue.
Electricity comes from whatever socket happens to be nearby -- what
Kloehn calls "living off somebody else's grid."
A descendant of Civil War president Abraham Lincoln who, according
to legend, grew up in a log cabin, Kloehn paid about $1,000 for the
dumpster, known in the trash business as a six-yard humpback.
He spent another couple of thousand on fittings and insulation --
about as much as one month's rent for a cramped Manhattan
studio.
"It's actually kind of neat, considering what he built it out of,"
said Ryan Mitchell, who blogs about tiny-house design and
construction at www.thetinylife.com.
In a nation where the average home is 2,600 square feet (241 square
meters), tiny houses -- typically 186 square feet, but going up to
400 square feet -- are fetching more attention, not least from
aging baby boomers looking to downsize in their retirement
years.
"There are more builders. There are more people seeking to live in
tiny houses," Mitchell told AFP by telephone from North Carolina,
where he is completing his own diminutive dwelling.
There would be even more tiny homes, he said, if if local zoning
regulations and housing codes were not so restrictive.
In a back alley in Washington, a four-unit tiny-house community has
taken root at Boneyard Studios (www.boneyardstudios.com),
showcasing the possibilities of small-is-beautiful housing in the
heart of the nation's capital.
"It's not for everyone by any means," said Jay Austin, whose
140-square foot home at Boneyard Studios, the Matchbox, is totally
off-grid, self-sustaining and carbon-neutral.
In New York, the city's museum is showing off a 325 square foot
micro-apartment boasting all the features of a unit twice its size
-- and it's invited a lucky few to try it out for size by spending
the night in it.
"I actually could see myself living here," museum intern Taylor
Jones told the New York Times after a sleepover this week, although
she worried how cluttered such a compact space could become.
Not content with making a dumpster just for himself, Kloehn has
used found materials -- a fridge door here, some castaway lumber
there, topped with a fiberglass hood from a pickup truck -- to
create a "debris home" on wheels for the homeless.
He's also tinkered with barbecue and salad bars on bicycle frames,
documenting them on his www.gregorykloehn.com blog.
Back in Brooklyn, where he's in the early stages of turning four
20-foot shipping containers into an "interactive sculpture"
literally a stone's throw away, Kloehn climbs atop his dumpster's
sundeck and casts an eye over his neighborhood.
Over here, there's the cavernous artists' loft whose owner kindly
lets him keep his dumpster in the back yard. In front, the
abandoned yet majestic New York Dock Company warehouse. And over
there, the gleaming white Queen Mary II that just sailed into
town.
"The bigger the home, the bigger the problems," Kloehn mused.
"There's more overhead, more things to go wrong, more yard to take
care of." And, he shrugged, "your're going to fill it up eventually
with junk."
