When tracing the roots of backyard cottages (Accessory Dwelling Units, ADUs), renegade builders of tiny houses in Sonoma engaged the public —and, eventually, legislation.

ADUs didn’t come out of nowhere in California. Before it was legal to build a secondary living unit on most single-family lots across the state (thanks to a rare alignment of grassroots and institutional interests across all demographics), many people were finding workarounds to live, temporarily or permanently, in “annexes,” “pool houses” and other types of secondary unit.

In places like Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, those units were often built on wheels, so they could technically be RVs. Soon, the many hassles and problems associated with informal housing raised the big question: why not allow people to build Accessory Dwelling Units on their property and call it a day?

Once people understood that the new units could house relatives or tenants with a legal contract, there was little to dislike about the idea. ADUs are extra living square feet, proportionally increasing their property values. It’s a simple and compelling idea. However, many people were skeptical about it.

And, to look at the prehistory of ADUs, one has to go back to the mid-2000s, when a group of idealists clustered around the Santa Rosa area of Northern California reacted against the skyrocketing housing prices by getting some tools, Craigslist heirlooms, and mostly salvaged wood to build what they called “tiny houses.”

A mentality shift after the subprime crisis

We were busy as a family in the summer of 2010. Our oldest daughter was three and a half years old and had become an enlightened question-asker, some sort of Socratic toddler. Our then-youngest, now middle daughter was just one and barely walking. We were tired but happy.

Professionally, it looked like there was a chance to avoid going back to institutional working places (Kirsten had worked for TV in San Francisco and NYC, and I had worked as a journalist in the Barcelona area). Among the stories and videos that were taking off, there were the endeavors of people refusing (or unable) to pay a house mortgage or sky-high rent in the Bay Area (Jay Shafer) or New York City (Felice Cohen).

When Kirsten posted the story on Felice Cohen’s rented micro-apartment, Good Morning America called her to our apartment in Barcelona. We were doing such stories on YouTube; it was so early that there was little else.

Hard to believe when it’s been years since people caught up and made sure to ride the wave, milk the cow, and [apply any other metaphor on these lines here]. We didn’t intend to ride any wave nor call ourselves “tiny house this and that” (being born in a small place, being forever small, or becoming the explorers of small places). Others did soon enough.

Meanwhile, in the early 2010s,’ we fell into the young parents’ perception trap, thinking that days would remain the same for a long time, and this is partly true. It’s also true that in a moment in life when we work hardest (for we have the energy, want to buy a car and a house, pay the bills, take vacations, etc.), we also raise children who want—and need —our attention. Because raising a family was first, and figuring out how to “stay hungry, stay foolish,” and getting a salary doing so, was second.

So it’s easy to relativize the importance and charm of those weeks when your children are literally learning the first things in their lives in front of your eyes. The days when they use words and sentences for the first time; when they outsmart you consciously, and they (and you) notice there’s a reciprocal understanding of the trick; when they venture by themselves somewhere, keeping an eye on you; when they learn to walk, jump, read, and much more.

It does go fast.

An early video and an old poem

Back to July 2010. We had flown into San Francisco from Barcelona a few weeks before with our two children, for their little brother would be born in August 2012. Pictures show us getting to their California grandparents’ home to spend the summer. Back then, their house in Cloverdale, Sonoma, would become our summer headquarters from where we’d travel across the US.

That year, we decided to keep our travels to the US West, including a visit to Sun Valley, Idaho, where some friends of Kirsten’s family let us use their beautiful vacation home there. The house was well-stocked with table games, books, and a deck leading to a freshly cut grassy meadow silhouetted by a high-mountain, swift, cold creek. So, we had opportunities to walk around the many trails in the area, where the many children of many of Kirsten’s siblings and ours could discover wildflowers of many colors and shapes.

There are pictures of a walk to visit Hemingway’s tomb (the writer and his family cherished their stays at their cabin in Idaho), one among many in the small Ketchum graveyard.

Fly fishing was another activity many tried that summer (A River Runs Through It landscape vibes), encouraged by somebody who could enjoy the secrets of a sport where the biggest happening is that it doesn’t happen much, except the raise of our senses into hyper-awareness amid nature —sounds, smells, the babble of the river, the sudden realization that one’s fishing bait is nothing compared to the many insects wandering around.

Perhaps that creek encouraged us to play a little bit with the arc of a small video that Kirsten edited there, influenced by the sound of the water passing through the house. We related the ever-changing water to Heraclitus’ idea of impermanence.

I mentioned that in Spain, high school kids learn a 15th-century poem by Jorge Manrique, Verses on the Death of His Father, remembering a passage inspired by Heraclitus that can be translated as follows:

Our lives are like the streams
That flow into the sea
And terminate;
That’s where the manors go—
They meet their end and they
Disintegrate;
Just as the rivers large,
The medium and small
Go to the sea,
We all arrive as one,
As workers in the field
Or rich and free.

Or, in John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s terms, who paraphrase Allen Saunders’s 1957 quote in the song Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) from 1980, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Sonoma’s early tiny house movement

Perhaps living fast as a young family, working hard and raising small children, makes one question for the first time that life really speeds up as we grow older, with years and experiences piling up, so we’d better grow the discipline to cherish moments past to be inspired today: nothing like making one’s stream of consciousness (our eternal NOW) count. It’s not a matter of getting obsessed about it, but this perception of impermanence may help us get a vantage point from where we appreciate past and present adventures, which inspire our projection into the future.

Driving back to Northern California from Idaho, we heard many stories of Kirsten and family driving there when they were kids, packing a Suburban with six kids and all sorts of possible gear for winter and summer adventures.

Like the previous summers, local people and the excellent local newspaper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, made us discover many early stories of what would become the so-called Tiny House Movement. Sonoma County, until then the northern rural boundary of the San Francisco Bay Area, was creatively adapting to the housing shortage and the hike in prices after the subprime crisis, especially some young entrepreneurs and potential back-to-the-landers, many of whom couldn’t afford to live closer to the city.

That’s how we heard about the blogger (and pioneer reporting on tiny houses) Kent Griswold, who visited us in Cloverdale, leading to a post by him, a video by Kirsten, and an improvised photo session. Thanks to friends and articles published by the Press Democrat, in those early years, we met Shelter Publications publisher and self-building pioneer Lloyd Kahn in Bolinas, Jay Shafer, one of the pioneers of tiny houses, at his tiny home in Sebastopol south of Santa Rosa.

In the summer of 2010, we got notice that Jenine Alexander, one idealistic young DIY builder from Healdsburg, the picturesque town along the Russian River in the heart of Sonoma County, was spreading locally what then was considered one crazy idea: if prices were too high to buy or rent anything in the area, why not using a conventional trailer base of 20 to 24 feet long by 8 feet wide to build a moveable, quirky home on top?

Jenine Alexander’s $3,500 rolling home

Inspired by Jay Shafer and other local DIY builders of the then-niche tiny houses, Jenine had already built her earlier small home on wheels for less than $3,500, not counting the real value of the materials gifted and/or salvaged, and the hours of work she’d put on it.

In a town where, at that moment, the median home price was already over half a million dollars, she decided to build her own but, instead of getting caught in the catch-22 of buying a lot and getting a structure permitted, she decided to build her own abode over a trailer base, so it was considered an RV. And that was the whole point that excited so many DIY builders those days, and still does: she built it on wheels not just to get around minimum size standards but mostly because she couldn’t afford land in her hometown. It was a chance to have a place of her own —and on her own terms.

However, if it was legally a recreational vehicle, it just didn’t feel like a conventional RV: it was a clapboard whimsical structure filled with patina and personal style, capable of containing the thousand stories that make a home. Her story was fresh and compelling:

“It’s a house that’s mobile… For me, it just made sense because I don’t own any land yet. The land is so expensive around here that I don’t have access to that kind of opportunity. What do I have access to, the dump, to Craigslist.”

Those feel like the early days of many things. The subprime mortgage crisis was fresh in the memory, and towns like Vallejo had filed for bankruptcy; social media were perceived as a powerful and positive communication tool, and many people genuinely shared their knowledge and endeavors in a grassroots, decentralized way. Old-school idealists from the area, like Lloyd Kahn, were excited again (he was indeed beginning to plan his series of books on the new self-building trends, beginning with tiny houses).

So when we visited Jenine Alexander, friends of friends were asking her for advice, despite some of the temporary factors of her unconventional house’s status, which was parked at a relative’s property. Hence, it had a murky, unpermitted status —the same a conventional RV would have if used for permanent living by the side of a house. She was building a second home on wheels, 128 sqft in size, with the help of a friend, Amy Hutto.

Books that helped reignite self-building in California (and abroad)

If her original rolling home had cost little else than the price of a used trailer and some fasteners, she had purchased a few more things for her second project, from plywood to high-efficiency doors and windows, but the goal hadn’t changed: the RV status of tiny homes on wheels allowed people to get around building codes.

Three books had accompanied Jenine Alexander on her two builds to our visit in the summer of 2010: Lester Walker’s Tiny Houses, or How to Get Away From It All, an obscure book from 1950 titled Your Dream Home: How to Build It for less than $3,500 by Hubbard H. Cobb; and the classic from Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (1977), a cherished gift from her mom.

It’s no coincidence that in every single visit we made early on with people building their small dwellings, many of them on wheels and hence moveable, but not always, we kept seeing a few books that were influential in those beginnings, among them Shelter by Lloyd Kahn (which we recently saw inside a well-stocked free library maintained by Henrik Lande Andersen inside the remote WWII bunker he restored for people to stay in Lofoten, Norway, above the Arctic Circle), and A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander.

This isn’t a coincidence; both books are encyclopedic in the original sense, collecting and disseminating useful knowledge in a frictionless manner, and both books express a very American can-do attitude. Both are also issued from the California counterculture and are related to when the Whole Earth Catalog, a self-published fanzine, was more influential among experimental builders than institutional knowledge.

When A Pattern Language was published in 1977, it was much easier to buy cheap land near San Francisco and build one’s own abode, which today has become economically prohibitive and technically unfeasible. Lloyd Kahn mentions in our last video with him that, back in the early seventies, when he and Lesley settled in Bolinas, there were tens of people building their own homes just in that tiny, quirky village north of the city.

Many things have changed, and the technological revolution that the world has experienced has one epicenter, the Bay Area, which translated into a perfect storm to make the place too expensive for people to live.

Patterns worth revisiting

However, the book by Christopher Alexander et al. seems to be reading the future, for its patterns 153 to 158 are dedicated to one NEED to be explored and optimized in single family lots: additional buildings. But, instead of giving the advice to maximize built space, the authors make sure that people get to know the organicity and characteristics of their homes, so they can connect the private quarters (home) with additional buildings: office, rooms to rent, teenagers’ cottages, old age cottages, settled workspace, home workshops, and “connectors” between those (through, for example, “open stairs”).

Ever-evolving families (couples, then children, then an empty nest, then a place to gather many subfamilies) will like the pattern 153, called “rooms to rent”:

“As the life in a building changes, the need for space shrinks and swells cyclically. The building must be able to adapt to this irregular increase and decrease in the end for space.”

A Pattern Language, p.724

The book goes on to explain how this advice could be applied in practice. As for pattern 154, or “larger cottage,” what to say but to state, well, that many tiny houses have been built following this spirit:

“If a teenager’s place in the home does not reflect his need for a measure of independence, he will be locked in conflict with his family.”

A Pattern Language, p.724

Only, we don’t only see teenagers in the picture, but bachelors who just graduated with a pile of debt and need a place to start:

“To mark a child’s coming of age, transform his place in the home into a kind of cottage that expresses in a physical way the beginnings of independence. Keep the cottage attached to the home, but make it a distinctly visible bulge, far away from the master bedroom, with its own private entrance, perhaps its own roof.”

A Pattern Language, p.727

A place of one’s own

Talking about impermanence: at the other end of life, pattern 155 is dedicated to building an “old age cottage”; it’s no coincidence that ADUs are also known as “granny units” and “granny suits.” Why do granny units make so much sense? Here’s Christopher Alexander’s explanation from A Pattern Language:

“Old people, especially when they are alone, face a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, there are inescapable forces pushing them toward independence: their children move away; the neighborhood changes; their friends and wives and husbands die. On the other hand, by the very nature of aging, old people become dependent on simple conveniences, simple connections to the society about them.”

A Pattern Language, p.730

Finally, as I age and begin to appreciate manual work, patterns 156 and 157 make more and more sense to me. Pattern 156 is called “settled work”:

“The experience of settled work is a prerequisite for peace of mind in old age. Yet our society undermines this experience by making a rift between working life and retirement, and between workplace and home.”

A Pattern Language, p.734

“Give each person, especially as he grows old, the chance to set up a workplace of his own, within or very near his home. Make it a place that can grow slowly, perhaps in the beginning sustaining a weekend hobby and gradually becoming a complete, productive, and comfortable workshop.

A Pattern Language, p.735

Contemporary trends also vindicate pattern 157, “home workshop”:

“Make a place in the home, where substantial work can be done; not just a hobby, but a job. Change the zoning laws to encourage modest, quiet work operations to locate in neighborhoods. Give the workshop perhaps a few hundred square feet; and locate it so it can be seen from the street and the owner can hang out a shingle.”

A Pattern Language, p.739

Making places for free thinkers and doers

When visiting tucked-away alleys in old cities that we’ve come to know in depth, like Barcelona, Paris, or New York City, I’ve always paid attention to the remnants of old workshops in what today we call “mixed-use areas.” When in Paris, I used to take everyday errands that showed me the power of this piece of advice (A Pattern Language, p.739, last paragraph):

“Give the workshop a corner where it is especially nice to work—LIGHT ON TWO SIDES (159), WORKSPACE ENCLOSURE (183); a strong connection to the street—OPENING TO THE STREET (165), WINDOWS OVERLOOKING LIFE (192); perhaps a place to work in the sun on warm days—SUNNY PLACE (161). For the shape of the workshop and its construction, start with THE SHAPE OF INDOOR SPACE (191)…”

A Pattern Language, p.739

Accessory dwelling units are an opportunity to build more housing while giving owners of single-family houses and lots the agency to go ahead with the idea or not. Outbuildings “slightly independent” but still related (and connected) to the main structure make sense in a multidimensional way —in 1977, now, and 50 years from now.

Why have a world of autonomous, disconnected dwellings with a single entrance, in which every household or lot uses a centralized entry and controls what happens in a very unsettling way? Houses can be more porous and enrich their inhabitants, while keeping a relation with their environment:

“The single, centralized entrance is the precise pattern that a tyrant would propose who wanted to control people’s comings and goings. It makes one uneasy to live with such a form, even where the social policy is relatively free.

“This may very easily sound paranoid. But the point is this: socially, a libertarian society tries to build for itself structures which cannot easily be controlled by one person or one group ’at the helm.’ It tries to decentralize social structures so there are many centers, and no one group can come to have excessive control.

“A physical environment which supports the same libertarian ideal will certainly put a premium on structures that allow people freedom to come and go as they please. And it will try to protect this right by building it into the very ground plan of buildings and cities. When we feel uneasy in a building that is spatially over-centralized and authoritarian, it is because we feel unprotected in this way; we feel that one of our basic rights is potentially vulnerable aid is not being fully affirmed by the physical structure of the environment.”

A Pattern Language, p.743