Tiny Houses, Tall Stories
New Tiny Houses!
The images below are pieces that were completed in the beginning of May 2025.
I’ve been making these tiny house drawings on and off for nearly 20 years—maybe not quite that long, but close. They haven’t always looked like they do now. Like me, they’ve evolved. But the theme of small houses on towering stilts has stayed with me, especially since moving to the coast.
After graduating from Auburn’s Architecture Program, I moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to design homes and work with communities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was a time of intense rebuilding and reimagining. The homes we designed were raised higher and higher off the ground as FEMA and building codes shifted. It was a wild landscape to navigate as a young designer. I wasn’t doing it alone—I was following the lead of the design studio director—but I was constantly thinking about what it meant to elevate people.
What happens to a community when it touches the ground less? How do people remain social, move from one home to another, gather, celebrate? How do you decorate a front porch that’s twelve feet in the air?
Those questions began to take shape in my sketchbooks. The houses I drew started off just slightly taller than reality, but over time they stretched into entire cities suspended in the air—barely touching the ground, connected by ladders, stairs, and structure. They became joyful spaces, flying flags, bursting with color. The drawings stopped being just about avoiding floodwater. They started to tell a story of adaptation and resilience—of people creating joy in a new kind of world.
These days, I don’t draw tiny houses as often. When I do, it feels more like a meditation. And they’re getting harder to make. My once-better-than-average eyes—still doing okay, with just a light pair of cheaters—now blur just enough to make these little details hard to see. For now, it’s fine. But I’m not sure how much longer I can make them at this scale. They might be morphing again, becoming something new to accommodate the shape of my seeing—and the stage of my life.
Some history:
Below are some pictures of elevated houses over time.
