There are two parallel housing movements that I have been thinking about recently. The first is “Tiny Houses” and the other is “Low-Impact” homes. Both have admirable merits and a friend of mine mentioned that it reminded him of the “prairie homesteaders” that passed through here in the early days of the U.S. advance to the west.

The above video features a tiny house from the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. This company features many unique and stylish small houses that anyone can purchase and, in part, grew out of The Small House Society which is located in my home state of Iowa.

The Tumbleweed Tiny House Company offers ready made tiny houses that you can tow away or detailed plans to build your own for the “do-it-yourself” folks. Apparently, they will do some custom design work too.

Simon Dale of the UK has taken the low impact home even further, creating a house out of entirely natural materials. Having so much regard for the environment, his home becomes a part of it.

For a interesting alternative along similar lines, take a look at A Low Impact Woodland Home built by the Simon Dale family. Their site goes through the fascinating process of how they built their home and the reasoning behind it. (You can’t get any more ‘Retro’ by using housing techniques thousands of years old.) They are also involved with a group that intends to create a entire low-impact sustainable eco village.

These kinds of housing movements share some benefits. Cost, being a big part of that, because it is generally far less expensive to construct such homes and in most cases can be done by one’s self with a few helping hands. Utility costs are also much lower than a traditional home. Other benefits are, of course, a more ecological friendly way to build living environments for ourselves.

Certainly, such living isn’t for everyone. Whether it is for material or social reasons, or even if some just refuse to consider the idea, the modern majority will not go down this road themselves. These are fascinating endeavors however and I’ll continue to watch these alternative housing projects (and other “less extreme” ones) over time.