Two years ago, Dee Williams, a toxic-waste inspector, put her 2,000-sq.-ft. bungalow in Portland, Ore., on the market and moved into an 84-sq.-ft. cabin on wheels that she built using salvaged cedar, torn-up jeans for insulation and solar cells for power. Then she hitched her tiny house to a biodiesel truck and drove to Olympia, Wash., where friends agreed to let her park in a grassy corner of their backyard. Although Williams, 43, admits that she misses having room for friends to spend the night, she says, "I love my tiny house."

Living small is hardly a new concept. Henry Thoreau tucked himself into a 150-sq.-ft. house on Walden Pond in the 1840s, and the city of San Francisco built some 5,600 earthquake cottages for survivors of the 1906 temblor. But over the past decade, dozens of architects and builders have begun specializing in tiny-house designs. And home buyers--motivated by the desire to simplify their lives, use fewer resources and save money--are falling in love with the little things. Gregory Johnson, a co-founder of the Small House Society in Iowa City, Iowa, estimates that anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand homes measuring less than 500 sq. ft. and costing less than $100,000 have been built since his group of 40 architects and builders formed in 2002. Says architect Marianne Cusato, a small-home designer who lives in a 300-sq.-ft. apartment in New York City: "It's human nature to gravitate toward something that makes you feel contained."

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