Who said you have to live in one place? Maybe some tiny houses would be preferable.
That’s what Robert Losonsky and Edith Wassenaar discovered when they swapped a typical house in the Netherlands for several smaller ones, adopting an itinerant lifestyle — one that prioritizes activities like surfing over work — in the process.
Surprisingly, their embrace of small-scale living began with a hunt for more space.
In 2017, they lived in a 1,500 square foot apartment in an upscale neighborhood in The Hague. “But we started working more and more from home,” said Mr. Losonsky, now 54, who had a career in sales at Microsoft, while Ms. Wassenaar, now 49, worked as a freelance marketing consultant and business coach.
Inevitably there were conflicts. Ms. Wassenaar, for example, might want to entertain clients in the apartment while Mr. Losonsky was on a conference call. “So I thought, ‘Well, why don’t we find something small on the side so we don’t have to bother each other all the time?'” he said.
Tiny House No. 1: 19th Century Fisherman’s Cottage
Being avid kite surfers, they decided to look for a place on the North Sea in The Hague and found a 600 square foot fisherman’s house built in 1878 just steps from the beach. After buying it for €180,000 ($190,000) in April, they spent 18 months and €150,000 ($158,000) gutting it with the help of Global Architects.
“It was in very bad shape and it looked like there hadn’t been much maintenance done in the last hundred years,” said Arthur S. Nuss, owner of the company.
So they removed the walls that divided the house into several narrow rooms and proceeded to create an open interior with a beachy atmosphere: plastered walls, micro-cement floors, rustic wooden beams and a small living room anchored by a wood stove.
To minimize the presence of the kitchen, which doubles as a dining area, they hid the fridge and oven under a staircase leading to the single bedroom. They also added wood fiber insulation, new windows and solar panels on the roof to make the house more energy efficient.
When the renovation was complete, the couple was so pleased with their new compact living space, proximity to the beach, and friendly neighborhood that they came to an unexpected conclusion: They wanted to live there forever.
“That’s how the downsizing started,” Ms. Wassenaar said. “We started living in the small place and renting the bigger house in the upscale neighborhood.”
Mr Losonsky added: “The funny thing is we left almost everything back in the old house. We couldn’t get any cupboard or any desk because it wouldn’t fit. We literally left our old lives behind and completely re-evaluated what was really important to us.”
Before long, Mr. Losonsky, who had bought the couple’s old apartment before he met Ms. Wassenaar and paid off the mortgage, had another realization: With the rent coming in and the expenses down, he no longer needed to work. He retired at the end of 2019, just before turning 50.
Tiny House #2: Wheels!
Inspired by surfers traveling around Europe chasing waves in camper vans and buses, they soon decided they needed wheels too.
Because Mr. Losonsky no longer had to be in an office and Ms. Wassenaar could work from anywhere, “We felt this freedom,” she said. “Europe is so small, but so dense with culture and opportunity that we wanted to explore it more.”
They bought a lightly used 2018 Fiat Ducato truck for about 25,000 euros ($26,500), dreamed up an interior design project for their home on wheels, and hired Custom camping to equip it for around €35,000 ($37,000). The camper now has a loft bed, wool covered walls, wood paneled ceiling, kitchen with stove and sink, shower and composting toilet.
“Covid hit just as they were ready,” Ms Wassenaar said, but that didn’t stop them from traveling.
They drove 1,000 miles to the south of Spain, where they camped for a few months. They then traveled by boat to the island of Sardinia, Italy, where “we lived on the most beautiful beaches, with no one around,” Ms Wassenaar said. “We found ourselves in heaven.”
Tiny Home No. 3: An Island Fixer-Upper
While staying in their van longer than expected, they spotted a rundown 650 square foot house for sale in Mandriola, on the west side of the island. “We looked at each other and said, ‘It’s a project, but we’ve already done it once, so let’s do it again,'” Ms. Wassenaar said.
They bought the house for 120,000 euros ($127,000) in September 2021. They then hired an engineer who told them the roof was covered in asbestos and the sandstone walls were no longer structurally sound. The whole house, as it turned out, had to be rebuilt.
This time, the couple worked alongside their contractors in between trips to The Hague. To save space, they installed a folding ladder from the Klapster to the sleeping loft. when not in use, it disappears into the wall. They stripped the bark from the hemlock trees so they could use the trunks as ceiling beams and reused slices of the original sandstone as a decorative feature to give some walls the look of age.
“When you walk into the house now, the feeling is, ‘Oh, what a wonderful old house this is,'” Ms. Wassenaar said. “But it’s all new.”
The house, which they call Microcosmos, was completed in March 2023, after a renovation that cost about 120,000 euros ($127,000).
Now the couple can hardly believe the life they are living.
“It’s still starting to sink in with the freedom we’ve created for ourselves,” Mr Losonsky said. “All our friends ask when we will stay in The Hague and when we will stay in Sardinia. The real answer is we don’t know. We just want to go with the flow.”
Living Small is a bi-weekly column that explores what it takes to live a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.
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