In a downsizing world of living places, cozy microspaces.

The big dream has been downsized and made cozier. Houses, the embodiment of many of those dreams, are shrinking, and a cottage industry of smallness has cropped up as people look for shelter, escape and fulfillment in tiny nooks.

Liu Ming, who teaches Chinese medicine and feng shui in California, lives in a 102-square-meter loft. “There is no cozy,” he says of his airy space. So he installed a two-meter plywood and plexiglass cube in his loft, which serves as a meditation space, tearoom, sleeping space and study.

“In feng shui, we talk about the harmony in the place that you live in,” he told The Times. “The cube evolved out of wanting cozy with the option of keeping a big open space at the same time.”

The microhouse, or microspace, has become a vehicle for transformation, if not tranquility.

On her six-hectare property in the Catskill Mountains about two hours north of New York City, Sandra Foster created her dream house by renovating a hunting cabin into a 3-by-4 meter Victorian cottage. “My refuge,” she calls it. There is no bathroom or kitchen, but it is a space she has been imagining since she was 15 and her family lost their home. It’s a “soul-satisfying” space full of chandeliers and stacks of china . “If you don’t have a home, you don’t have a sense of place,” she told The Times.

“You don’t have a life, you don’t have a soul.”

Unless it’s in the backyard. Sheds made by companies like Kithaus, Modern-Shed and Shelter-Kit sell prefabricated offices, playrooms or cabanas starting at $10,000. With old marketing assumptions like making a quick profit off a house dispelled, people are looking for ways to stay happy while staying put. And the shed has become an escape from the distractions of home life.

“For people my age, in their 50s, the dreams of their youth didn’t hold up, but now they have some resources and a little bit of land,” Will Bruder, a Phoenix architect whose small, lightweight structures were an inspiration for modernist sheds, told The Times.

“It’s about what could have been,” he added, “or what should have been.”

Matilda McQuaid, deputy curatorial director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, told The Times: “You cross a threshold into another realm just steps from your home.”

Or, in the home itself. Portable, prefabricated houses, many just over nine square meters, are part of the cult of small. The HabiHut, a oneroom structure, weighs about 180 kilograms, packs down to a 1-by-2 meter crate and costs $2,500.

Although customers are using the structures as offices, hunters’ shelters and ice fishing shacks, HabiHut sees other markets: the third world ; disaster areas for displaced people; and homeless populations. They are already in use in Kenya and Haiti, and are being tested as water stations.

HabiHut hopes to build a community for people who have been displaced by violence in Gilgil, Kenya. It would be a village of HabiHuts, with water, sanitation and cellphone charging stations and a solar dish. “That’s everything you need,” Sean Weas of HabiHut said.

Self-contained, protective, all-inone shelters may just be the future of living, even if on a grander scale. As Masamichi Katayama, the Japanese cult designer who created spaces for Godiva, Nike and Uniqlo in Midtown Manhattan, told The Times: “I would like to create a building that includes every possible facility, such as a hospital, a school, a hotel, retail stores, to create a town within a building.”


ANITA PATIL