SEATTLE — We sit in the “cafe area” of Steve Sauer’s minuscule apartment enjoying the view from the home’s only window, street level. Dogs on leashes and legs on humans pass by.
Sauer stands up. This is to demonstrate that at 6-foot-2 he has a no-more-than-needed 2-inch clearance between his head and the ceiling.
Sauer likes this precision. Awkward spaces, wasted places annoy him. “What I really wanted was one place with exactly what I needed and wanted. Quality is more important than quantity for me, and extra space only a problem,” he has written.
And that explains it: The uber-cool, fully functional 182-square-foot home for two on the basement floor of a 102-year-old apartment building that Sauer is finishing after seven years of work. It could also have something to do with his line of work — airplane interiors engineering. “I wanted to compress my home to squirt me back out to the community,” he says, taking inspiration from dwellings in Scandinavia and Japan. “That was one of the philosophical reasons. I want to be able to shop daily, not store a lot, and eat really well.”
Homeowners are building smaller in general. It’s economical and ecological. But few do it in 11-feet-3-inches wide, by 16-feet-2-inches deep, by 10-feet-4-inches tall (Sauer is very accurate) with two beds, a full kitchen with a dishwasher, bathroom with a shower, a soaking tub set into the floor just inside the front door. On three living levels. There’s also closet space, a dining table and storage for two bikes. Down in the “video lounge,” directly beneath the “cafe area,” we do lounge — on a seating for two. An arm’s length, to the right, is the dining table.
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“Everything represents 10 to 100 hours of Internet searching,” says Sauer. “I wanted a really high level of finish, but small.” We move to the dining area. Sauer says, “The greatest innovation anywhere for space is boats. Even more than spaceships and submarines.”
Always thinking.
“I’ve built things my whole life. I have to do something to keep myself sane. Plus, the parties have been fantastic,” says Sauer, who reports his finished place holds a crowd of 10.
“My dream is to put 300 of these in a building and not have it be a tenement.”