Opinion: Would Anyone Ever Aspire to Live in a Micro Home?
This last Friday, the Wall Street Journal launched a new real estate section called “Mansion.” WSJ managing editor Robert Thomson implied in a statement that it wasn’t just about the rich admiring their big homes, saying “We all like to think of our home as a mansion, even if it is a humble abode, and we all have the license to aspire.”
The section we saw featured homes like tax-shelter luxury apartments in Puerto Rico, 9500 sq ft modern homes in Napa CA, 17K sq ft Telluride ski lodges, a look at several “sky garage” condos (i.e. a car life allows you to park your Lamborghini or Ferrari in your unit) and the migration of tech moguls to multi-million dollar home in Los Angeles. Humble abodes these are not.
Truth be known, when we set about building the 420 sq ft LifeEdited apartment, we wanted to create a new variety of aspirational home–one that relied on great design and intelligent use of space rather than massive square footage and Olympic-sized hot tubs. While this aspirational model might work with select populations (and they’re probably all reading this post right now), we wonder whether a compact home would be something the greater public could get into?
What do you think? Will micro homes forever appeal to very select populations? Will the mainstream always consider them worst-case-scenarios or might they see them as something to aspire to? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Photo Credit: Susan McWhinney/WSJ