Salem is primarily known for its grand Federal mansions, but there are lots of amazing smaller houses in the city as well. I’m fortunate to live in quite a big house, but it has a small apartment attached to it, and at various times in my life when things were chaotic or complex or troubling I just wanted to shut the big house up and seek sanctuary in the tiny flat, where everything is small-scaled, compartmentalized, and manageable. There’s a whimsical, dollhouse-like, Alice-in-wonderland quality to the apartment, but of course I’ve never lived there, and as we have a very nice tenant I can’t just take up residence on a whim.
There are several small houses in Salem that evoke similar feelings of simplicity through scale, and they have lots of charming (primarily Dutch) details to boot. The first house below, built around the time of the American Revolution, is located just off Federal Street in the McIntire Historic District, and the other two nineteenth-century houses are located off Derby Street.
These are pretty tiny houses, with a very small footprint and perhaps one or two rooms on each floor (I cheated a bit with the last one, which has an addition). In some future post I’ll showcase small old houses (which Salem has in abundance, particularly Georgian “urban cottages”), but these are really small old houses. Lots of older cities in America and Europe have tiny, narrow rowhouses, often called “spite” houses, built to fill gaps in the existing streetscape, like these two Virginia houses: the Spite House of Alexandria and the adorable little (again, Dutch) cottage built adjacent to the Old Stone House at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond.
But there’s just something about a tiny freestanding house, like the Salem houses above and Mark Twain’s boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri below, that is particularly appealing. These houses are so self-contained and self-sufficient, but on such a small scale. Of course the small house movement, and its even more environmentally correct tiny house movement, have been gathering steam for some time now. An exemplar of the latter is below, from the Tumblewood Tiny House Company.
Mark Twain House in Hannibal, Missouri, 1933. HABS, Library of Congress
April 15th, 2011 at 9:39 am
They’re sweet. And of course humans were slightly smaller years back.
April 15th, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Hah! Had to laugh at Julia’s comment above. So true. My 6 ft-6 brother in law would be hard pressed to find any comfort in the accommodation above!
But they are darling. My older daughter longs for a small house. Not sure why.. but she’s always loved tiny spaces, and I often find her tucked inside the built-in blanket chest in her closet, secreted with a book, snack and flashlight. Strange, but true!!
My friends used to live in a tiny 2 story (1 rm each floor) house in the middle of Philadelphia. WAAAAY too small for me, but super cozy to visit frequently!!
Lovely post.
April 16th, 2011 at 12:16 pm
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April 16th, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Could house #2 be any more attractive?
April 16th, 2011 at 4:26 pm
No, it could not, except in reality. My photograph does not do it justice because it looks like the back decks of the triple decker next door are looming over it. But that little house really has a presence on the street. And it is tiny!
May 27th, 2013 at 9:06 am
Great collection. The Narbonne House comes to mind, too.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/melystu/5515566784/
May 27th, 2013 at 1:02 pm
Love that house, Melinda, but it’s actually a bit bigger than these tiny dwellings!
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