One weekend in 2021, Gemma Warren was doing what she did every weekend: sitting over coffee at her home in Tulum, Mexico, looking at real estate listings for cabins in New York’s Catskill Mountains.
She and her husband, Nick Warren, who is English, had discovered the Catskills several years earlier while living in Brooklyn and working at London-based PR and marketing firms. They fell for the region’s fragrant forests, sunny meadows, icy streams, and not terribly threatening bears (unless provoked). They wanted to buy a weekender but couldn’t find anything that fit their budget.
So six years ago, they picked up and moved to Tulum, on the Yucatan Peninsula, because they also had a sunny, oceanic side to their nature. There they worked remotely. But the Catskills still beckoned.
In that fateful browsing session three years ago, Ms. Warren, now 37, saw a listing for a cabin in the western Catskills hamlet of Delancey, N.Y. The asking price: $65,000. The house was 192 square feet and had no heat and no toilet.
“A shack” is how Mr Warren, 38, described it: “There was running water. But that was pretty much it.”
And yet it sat on 6.8 acres thick with old trees and tall grasses. Next to it flowed a creek that audibly burst in a video. A large picture window looked out towards the water and forest.
Investigating further, the Warrens discovered that the tiny building with its overhanging roof had an unusual origin. It was one of the few surviving examples of a Bolt-Together House, a bare-bones cutie that Family Circle magazine published in 1972 in a series about DIY homes.
A young architect named Jeffrey Milstein had designed the house on paper as something that could be dismantled and moved if someone didn’t happen to own the land it occupied. The building was designed as rough-sawn plywood panels bolted to a collapsible frame of wooden posts and trusses attached to four concrete piers embedded in the earth.
Family Circle, riding the wave of eco-consciousness that swept through the 1970s, handed Mr. Milstein the money to build the house, gave it wide publicity and sold the plans.
“If you have a large garage, your husband can prefab the panels (none larger than 4’x8′). cut, drill and paint the posts and trusses. then move the entire house to your lot in a 16-foot rental truck,” the magazine suggested to readers it assumed were female and married.
The construction cost was about $2,500 ($18,680 in today’s dollars), including lumber, wiring, plumbing, heating (with a wood stove), kitchen appliances, and some built-in furniture, including a folding table. There was also a platform bed on the mezzanine, reached by a wall-mounted ladder.
The house was a hit; Family Circle sold 25,000 designs, more than any other work in its series. The Italian shelter magazine Abitare featured it in its May 1979 issue along with another of Mr. Milstein’s works that combined a house with a camping tent. Both designs were published in Lester Walker’s seminal 1993 guide to the small life, “The tiny book of tiny houses.”
Today, the Bolt-Together House is a rare species in the wild, a snow leopard for tiny house enthusiasts. ONE YouTube videos posted twelve years ago about a miserable survivor in New Brunswick, Canada, has garnered more than 53,000 views.
All of which explains why the Warrens were overwhelmed by the Delancey list. “It was just a dreamy little place for us that was in our budget and so unique,” Ms Warren said.
They weren’t the only fans, but they were determined to have it. “We made an offer straight out of Mexico without even going to town or seeing the cabin, which I think knocked the Realtor for six,” Ms. Warren said, using a term derived from the game of cricket to describe the feeling. to be hit hard with a club.
The sellers interpreted the couple’s tentative offer of $85,000 as less a gesture of enthusiasm than potential volatility and accepted the second best offer. As Mr Warren interpreted the rejection, the sellers feared that he and his wife were not serious and that they would be “confused”. As fate would have it, he added, “a few weeks later, the second highest bidder really screwed them over.”
The Bolt-Together House was now the couple’s, a retreat where they could spend several months of the year with their dogs, Taco, Margarita and Chili. But it still smelled like a shack.
If its builder had followed Mr. Milstein’s plans to the letter, the walls would have been insulated and there would have been sanitary facilities. (The house would also be 224 square feet.) However, neither winter comfort nor an indoor nightstand seemed to be a priority. Instead, there was a cottage some distance away in the meadow.
The Warrens installed insulation as well as electric heating as a base. However, their dream of a quickly acquired and affordable septic system was thwarted by the complexities of the site, its creek, and pandemic-related delays.
At that point, they discovered it Cinderella toilet, which incinerates waste at the push of a button. At $5,000, it was a bargain by comparison. They put it in a new bathroom, along with a walk-in shower with polished green wall tile.
Working with a local carpenter, they doubled the size of the kitchenette, from sub-par to tiny. Its counters and cabinets are maple with brass hardware, and there’s a two-burner electric stove and a chic farmhouse sink.
The couple also expanded the size of the mezzanine sleeping platform to accommodate a queen-size bed. They put in Wi-Fi which they said works much better than their Wi-Fi in Tulum.
Outside, they cut a road through the meadow and built a floating deck overlooking the creek.
The total cost of the renovations, they estimated, was $60,000.
Recently, the Warrens welcomed Mr. Milstein, now 79, to view the place. Despite the praise he received for the shelter’s innovative designs, he gave up the practice of architecture decades ago and now works as aerial photographer with a studio in Kingston, NY
“It was cute,” she said of the Warrens’ home. He understood why the couple had lightened the interior with white paint, although he described himself as more of a natural wood man. He also understood the sacrifice of the ground-level bedroom in his original design to make room for a larger kitchen.
“It was amazing how comfortable it was, with the four of us hanging out there,” he added, referring to the Warrens and his girlfriend, Kim Cantine. Ms. Cantine “had the idea that she wanted to find them all over the country and photograph me standing in front of them.”
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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