Diana’s Innermost House Revisited
Last month I was invited by Kent Griswold to write an article for his Tiny House Blog. Please visit that first article HERE to read the details of how Innermost House is laid out, how it works, and why it is designed the way it is. You will find two pages of questions and answers there as well.
I am very grateful to all the Tiny House Blog readers who made that article one of the most popular Kent has ever run, and especially for all the beautiful, sincere letters I received. Kent asked for more photographs of the house to share with his readers, and it is my pleasure to add them here.
Our way of living in Innermost House evolved very slowly. I have lived with my husband in more than twenty very small houses over the years, from colonial revival adobes in California, to a 19th century trapper’s log cabin in the Alleghenies, to an 18th century slave quarter in tidewater Virginia. We don’t think of our homes as small houses. We live for a special intensity of domestic life that simply requires a concentration of space to achieve.
This is Innermost House, my home in the woods. It is about twelve feet square and unelectrified, but it’s a very comfortable home. Thanks to the woods and to this old oak in particular, we have never registered a temperature over 75 degrees indoors, even when it’s 100 degrees out in the sun. The board and batten siding is of rough-sawn redwood. The covered porch at the entry is welcome in summer heat and winter rains. We keep tools and laundry in the shed you see here. There is a corresponding shed on the other side of the house which we use as a food pantry, and for storing candles and clean linens.