What does it mean to come home? To have a place of your own that feels safe in all the important ways? That wraps its arms around you when you arrive at the doorstep drenched in the problems of the world?
For decades, whenever I thought of home, I didn’t picture the houses I’d grown up in. Instead I thought of places I’d stayed on my travels. Serene hotel rooms, rumbling ships’ cabins, hip-swaying compartments on overnight trains. Small spaces that made me feel safely contained and part of something bigger at the same time.
Originally from Sydney, I was living in a studio apartment in a seaside village just south of Byron Bay in northern New South Wales when I first heard about tiny houses. I loved that the Byron area was lush, uncrowded and flanked by dairy farms and pockets of coastal rainforest. And I loved that living in a small town was much more affordable than living in a big city too.
Then the housing crisis spilled out of the cities and started spreading across Australia, pooling in regional areas. Rents increased. My landlady talked about selling the studio I was renting.
Then I turned 50. After successfully managing years of uncertainty in the holy trinity of steadying influences – my living situation, my love life and my work – I started to crave security.
My curiosity started poking its nose into alleyways of alternative housing. I collected articles and bookmarked websites about people who had built small homes cheaply, out of recycled windows or old tyres filled with earth. I did a natural building course, thinking I could build myself a little sustainable dwelling of some kind.