Small Lot House Plans & Cottage Building Plans From

This house was featured in Sarah Susanka's book, "Creating the Not So Big House", as well as House Beautiful and Down East magazines. It was designed by the architect to create a place that was wonderful to be in because it was small. The clients wanted the smallest footprint possible to minimize the impact on their beautiful land. It was a vacation home for their family of four, and was designed with the idea of enlarging it (which was later done) if they moved there year round.

You enter this house on a corner porch and immediately see across the diagonal of the house to another porch. Emphasizing the diagonal in the plan tends to minimize the sense of confinement that small houses must avoid. Since the intention was to only cut a small hole in the forest canopy, the architect took this compact footprint, and gave it a strong vertical component and a lot of roof glazing so the house could reach up toward the light, like the spruce trees around it. This assured that what sunlight fell down into this "hole in the forest" would get into the house.

On this site the house looks out to a quiet cove to the southeast, but this house would do well with any site where the approach is from a different direction than the primary view. The house can easily be mirrored to deal with a westerly as opposed to an easterly view orientation. It is desirable in a small house that circulation space has multiple uses, so both a front door and an airlock mudroom entry are off the front porch. In the dead of winter, the same front porch and the same entry hall inside will serve both entrances, with no hallways! Once inside the building, all of the rooms radiate off the central space, which is open to the roof ridge so that you can always get a sense of the entire space, even as you are sheltered in the cozier side spaces.

Unlike any other design we've ever seen, this unique home can face in any one of four directions! Because the two diagonal entry points work equally well as a "front" entry – the entry porch of the original home (which provides direct access to both the kitchen and the mudroom) could just as easily be the rear entry, and the deck entry (which provides direct access to the living spaces of the home as well as a guest bathroom) could just as easily be the front – and, the porch and deck can be accessed from two directions, all four sides of this house could be the front of the house. Quite an advantage when siting it on a specific piece of property!

Climb up the compact corner stair and the space at the top of the stairs is like a wide hallway that was developed into an office/study. Both the study and bath sit under the slopes of the roof. Walk from there along the balcony that goes past the bathroom (or the closet space) and you end up in the bedroom. This destination effect makes the bedroom feel like a very separate and private place because of the spatial transition to get to it. Once inside the bedroom, the bay window lets all the space fly out into the view so that you can almost forget that the house is behind you. The bedroom ceiling vaults to over 15' high, which adds to the dramatic effect.

It's a wonderful place to hunker down near the woodstove (which could become a fireplace) and wait out the winter, and in the summer all the glass makes it like living outside.

The original home was expanded 12 years after it was first built. Although we do not offer plans of the expanded version, you may see a photo of the expanded house and plan on the photos page.

Foundation Info
This house was originally designed to have a basement foundation. However, if you prefer a crawlspace or a slab foundation, these are fairly simple and inexpensive changes that your builder can often make for you. If the basement design is not displayed in the Floor Plans, it's because it is unfinished.

Please Note
Due to licensing agreements, this home may not be built in Hancock County, Maine.