Mahalo for supporting Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Enjoy this free story!

“It’s about leaving a smaller footprint in building materials and energy, but also being less encumbered with things like mortgages,” said former arts administrator Rich Richardson. Read more

It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Parked at the top of a driveway on a sunny, green hill in Kalihi, on a street of well-kept, older wooden houses, the new red cottage looked considerably smaller but very much at home. Only 18 feet long and 11 feet tall, with a gently curved, white roof and wheels, it recalled the little red caboose of the children’s book.

At 110 square feet, it was not only tiny but a super tiny home, said Rich Richardson, its proud designer and builder, as he moved the dwelling’s portable solar panels to a sunnier patch of ground. “Counting the deck, it’s actually 130 square feet.”

A sturdy stepladder led up to a wood lanai (the home rests on a trailer base about 2-1/2 feet above ground) and awning. Entered through French doors, the uncluttered, whitewashed interior felt airy and spacious with its vaulted ceiling easily accomodating Richardson, who is 6 feet tall, and the three other adults and one child who followed him inside. It was bright yet cool beneath the midday sun, thanks to big windows, a ceiling fan and the insulation in the floor, ceiling and walls.

Richardson, 55, said he drew up the plans and built the house with zilch architecture and construction experience and “only these two hands,” in the carport of the two-bedroom house he shares with his wife, Cori Gift, 40, a clinical social worker, and their daughter Ruby Rose, 6, a kindergartener at Waikiki School.

COMPONENTS OF RICH RICHARDSON’S TINY HOUSE >> Dimensions: 6 feet 8 inches wide, by 8 feet 8 inches tall, by 17 feet 8 inches long inside, 8 feet 5 inches wide, by 11 feet tall, by 18 feet long outside

>> Utilities: Exterior utility closet, placed on trailer hitch, contains propane tank; Marey propane on-demand water heater, vented to outside air; circuit box; DC (deep cell) solar battery; Wanderer solar charge controller (a pure sine wave inverter, it translates current from DC to AC); water catchment tank; water pump

>> Appliances: Atwood Wedgewood Vision stove; SMAD propane fridge with freezer; Lithonia LED lights; Kichler Arkwright DC motor fan; Air Head toilet; Wonder Wash hand-crank laundry machine

>> Decor: Premade cabinets and windows and custom-measure French doors, Home Depot; fold-out bed, IKEA

>> Materials: Flooring and walls from Re-use Hawai‘i

>> For more info: supertinyhomeshawaii.com; 778-6392

It was an amazing achievement, but most of all, the completed house embodies the next, new phase of his creative life, said the environmentalist and former arts administrator, who resigned in 2017 after five years of heading the Chinatown nonprofit The Arts at Marks Garage where he’d worked since 2001.

“It’s not just the house, it’s the lifestyle. After working indoors at a desk, I like working with my hands outdoors.” His title on his Super Tiny Homes Hawaii, super-tiny business card is artist/builder.

Richardson plans to continue the community-building mission he pursued at Arts at Marks by building affordable housing that’s also green and beautiful. Built with as many recycled local materials as possible and off the grid, “It’s about leaving a smaller footprint in building materials and energy, but also being less encumbered with things like mortgages.”

With a smile, he demonstrated how the desktop he made folds flush with the wall, enabling the bed to expand from a single to a double as Ruby, with an even bigger smile, vanished into her “secret closet” in the roomy kitchen cabinet.

“Where the desk is, the shepherd would have a wood-burning stove with a chimney,” said her father, referring to his original inspiration, an English shepherd’s hut.

So what’s the price? The materials cost him $25,000, and, factoring his time at minimum wage, his asking price is $55,000, versus the median price, as of January, of $767,500 for Oahu single-family homes. Of course, the tiny house doesn’t come with land, so you need private property on which to legally park and inhabit it, Richardson said. It is classified as a house trailer, permitted and registered with the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

The house was completed in late August; and Richardson has held two open houses. “I’ve had 200 people come and look at it,” he said, among them the graduate students in Professor Martin Despang’s design lab in the School of Architecture at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

“I’m really impressed by how brave Rich is, to take that personal risk — not a builder, just a guy, an artist — to reinvent himself, learning by doing, teaching himself,” Despang said. For his students, who found Richardson’s project on an assignment to find the most affordable housing model in ­Hawaii, “It was eye-opening” and also gave them hope for living in ­Hawaii, he said.

“Architecture is not the highest-­paying profession, so they got ­excited from their own perspective.”

TINY HOMES IN THEORY >> Tiny homes are increasingly popular, at least among browsers of shelter magazines and HGTV, if not in a reality constrained by local building codes. Fifty-three percent of Americans, and 63 percent of millennials, would consider living in a home smaller than 600 square feet, according to a 2018 survey by the National Association of Home Builders. But sales and occupancy data remain elusive. NAHB also reports that, in the first quarter of 2018, new single-family home sizes increased to 2,641 square feet after declining somewhat following the recession of 2007-2009.

>> Affordable, tiny homes are also showing potential in the public sector. Since 2018, Honolulu’s Kahauiki Village, a public-private partnership, has been housing homeless families in tiny, refurbished, prefabricated Japanese shelters that temporarily housed people displaced by the Fukushima disaster. And in at least 10 other U.S. cities, including Los Angeles and Seattle, nonprofit organizations have built or are building tiny-­house villages for low-income or homeless residents on donated land.

HOW HE DID IT

Richardson designed and built the tiny house in conformance with the international building code.

He took lessons on architectural drafting from a friend, attended a seminar in Seattle on tiny-home building and took a couple of subscription courses for do-it-yourselfers online. “They get you about 80 percent of the way and the rest you’re on your own,” he said with a merry laugh. “I did my own research and got to 95 percent. That’s where my friend and neighbor ‘Cowboy’ came in. The last 5 percent.”

Every week, Richardson would do a punch list of questions and meet with Will “Cowboy” Northrup, 71, a recently retired building contractor who lives across the street.

“I just gave him a little info once in a while and he did it all himself,” Northrup said, adding that he now hires Richardson to assist with occasional construction jobs.

Richardson did all the wiring and plumbing and then hired a licensed electrician and plumber to double-check his work. They both made some adjustments, he said. “They were expensive but they were worth it.”

He is proud of the way he sanded, stained and coated, with a clear finish, the solid wood flooring from a 100-year-old Douglas fir, reclaimed from a demolished old house by Re-use Hawai‘i. “The grain is so tight. That means it’s so strong.” But the most important detail to him is the curve of the corrugated metal roof.

He went to a classic machine shop, Universal Manufacturers, in Kalihi “and they remembered how to bend that kind of roof for a Quonset hut,” he said. Otherwise, he would have had to import it at prohibitive cost from Illinois.

He rejected rooftop photovoltaic panels to keep the pared-down, plantation-style, shepherd’s hut lightweight and mobile. “Plus, you can park the house under a tree for shade and place the PV in full sun.” The power cord, which connects to the converter in the external utility closet, is 20 feet long.

“At first the solar panels were so intimidating, I was so nervous, but I kept rereading the instructions and making sure I had followed them, and finally plugged it in,” Richardson said.

“Rich had many death-defying moments during this process,” said his wife with a smile. “One time during the hurricane watch with 35 mph winds, a neighbor called and said, ‘Cori, Rich is on the roof, I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ ”

As an extra ohana or rental space, Richardson said, his tiny home makes an easy Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) because it needn’t burden infrastructure.

It has rainwater catchment with gutters and a storage tank, “which you can also fill from a house’s garden hose.” The bathroom has a composting toilet of a sort used on boats, and grey water from the shower and kitchen sink can irrigate gardens.

“We have friends who couldn’t have a (conventional) ADU on their property because the sewage system is overtaxed,” Gift said.

The home is solar-powered, except for a cooktop and refrigerator fed by an exterior propane tank, but you have also have the option of disconnecting the solar panels and plugging it into a house’s socket, Richardson said.

Spare and small, but with a ceiling that’s “as cathedral-like as possible and still roadworthy,” the house’s lanai closes up and the awning closes down, and it’s ready to roll. All Richardson needs now is to sell it, so that he can afford to build his second super tiny home.