For a long time “bigger is better” has been the homeowner’s mantra. We often associate large homes with material success, power and glamour. Small homes, on the other hand, have tended to be synonymous with lack of privilege, overcrowding and inferior quality.

Gregory Paul Johnson is leading the trend for downsizing

Recently, though, these conceptions have started to shift. Big is losing some of its sheen while small is being rebranded as the home for our times.

Although the trend is to go “smaller” generally, some people are shrinking their houses to 500 sq ft and even less. Gregory Paul Johnson, co-founder of the Small House Society, lives in Iowa City, in the US mid-west. His cottage on a mobile trailer – 140 sq ft with a ceiling height of just over 6ft – could easily be a kid’s cubby house. But Johnson’s home is far from child’s play. The technology consultant, who is also the director of www.resourcesforlife.com, has lived there since he built it in 2003.

The interior is essentially a room with an alcove on one side containing shelves, a chair and desk, under which is stowed a pull-out table that at a pinch can sit two people; a kitchen made up of shelves, a two-ring stove and small sink; closets for storage; and, just barely above his head, a waist-high loft where a queen-sized bed dominates the floor space.

Does he ever pine for a bigger home? “No. It’s perfect for one and comfortable enough for two,” Johnson says. “I have everything I need and what I don’t have I outsource. I exercise and shower at a really nice gym during workdays. When I’m at home I share bathroom and laundry facilities with my dad, who lives in the neighbouring house. I eat out mostly. Living as I do frees up a lot of my time, which I can then use to earn more money to spend on things that actually grow in value, such as life experiences and relationships.”

According to Johnson, if you had Googled “small house” five years ago, “it would have been like putting in a search for small elephant or small whale – a contradiction in terms”. Now there are large numbers of internet sites, as well as a heap of books and many experts devoted to the subject.

The small house movement, as it is popularly known, is especially vocal in the US, even though, paradoxically, according to its National Association of Home Builders, the average size for a new house has been rising steadily – from 1,750 sq ft in 1978 to 2,479 sq ft in 2007, although the average fell back slightly according to quarterly data from 2008. Architect and author Sarah Susanka, whose book The Not So Big House is celebrating its 10th edition, is attributed with kickstarting this countermovement. The showy, supersized home, she says, is where “people rattle and some of the rooms are only ever visited by the cleaner”; smaller houses reflect “how people really live”.

Small has also spread to Japan, a famously space-constrained island, where “it seems everyone is getting in on the act”, according to Tokyo-based Azby Brown, author of The Very Small Home and Small Spaces and director of the Future Design Institute, a think tank on new technology in the home. Ironically, Japanese people used to aspire to owning American-sized homes, in spite of having led much of the inspiration for compact design – be it in electronics, cars, storage units or houses. Now they are embracing the idea of focusing on the essentials.

A typical Abito floorplan

“To live well in a small home you need to pare away the things you can live without and decide what really defines who you are,” Brown explains. “Maybe someone wants a big bed, one they can practically live in. I have friends like that. They eat most of their meals in bed, watch TV, do most of their e-mailing and so on there – even though it means they can’t also have a big sofa and six chairs in the living room.”

The “big idea” behind architect Takaharu Tezuka’s House to Catch the Sky, in Tokyo, which was built last year, is a sunny, spacious and appealing open-plan area where a family of four come together to cook, eat and play. The room is loosely divided. A long wall of floor-to-ceiling cabinets behind an island bench forms the kitchen and storage space; a couch and a coffee table define the sitting area. Its expansive 17ft by 26ft footprint belies the compactness of the rest of the 458 sq ft double storey, two-bedroom home. A sloping ceiling adds volume while tall windows flood the room with sunlight and a smaller set is strategically placed to frame the streetscape. As a compromise, the downstairs area is more subdued, containing a bathroom and two bedrooms.

A CRITIC’S PICKS

A minibox, a modular marvel and other stunning micro-houses

From ancient yurts to medieval almshouses, the world has a long history of “micro-homes”. But it was in 1920s Germany that the idea of “existenzminimum” met modern mass housing for the first time, writes Edwin Heathcote.

Families were installed in two-bedroom flats of 600-700 sq ft that were nonetheless light and airy with balconies or terraces and high-tech kitchens and bathrooms. The ideas quickly spread to neighbouring countries but took hold more slowly elsewhere. In the UK, “minimal dwellings” were left to the private sector, yielding London’s 1930s compact but well-planned Isokon flats, with built-in storage and outsourced dining and laundry (although most were occupied by artists and intellectuals with other residences). Eventually, though, it was Japan that took micro-homes to a new level, as lack of space, especially in Tokyo, forced invention. The prefabricated slot-in pod became an architectural tool; foldaway beds were created; and technology was expertly minimized.

Today we welcome a new wave of small houses. Aside from the Micro Compact House (M-CH) and House in a Suitcase, here are some of my favourites:

Bauart’s The Mobile 2000, a 65 sq metre, prefab two-storey unit clad in timber, complete with stove, glazed end walls and an intriguingly domestic plan providing diverse spaces.

Andreas Henrikson’s The Black Box, a 35 sq metre mini-house, including a small sleeping gallery, with a system of opening parts, including a drawbridge/front path and a louvred screen to the upper level that pivots up to create a canopy.

Heidi and Peter Wenger’s 40 sq metre holiday home in the Swiss Alps, which dispenses with walls, being just a triangulated roof, the front of which can be moved to create a terrace.

Bearth and Deplazes’ Maiensäss Cabin, a sparse but beautiful 70 sq metre dwelling with a chunk cut out to create a terrace and interiors embraced in sensuous figured pine.

Stephen Atkinson’s intelligent 50 sq metre house built for a retired Louisiana couple in the local vernacular with corrugated sheet metal, a timber frame and a separate brick barbecue-stack.

Oskar Kaufmann and Johannes Norlander‘s modular system, with a minimum space of 18 sq metres in which box units slide in and out of each other, like drawers, to expand it when necessary.

Holz Box Tirol’s Minibox, an ultra-tiny 7 sq metre, nautical-feel dwelling based around a stove with room for three to sleep, which was initially developed as emergency housing for the homeless.

The small living trend has inspired a plethora of other accommodation styles. In Barcelona the intriguing, 290 sq ft House in a Suitcase apartment, by architects Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores, takes its cue from Louis Vuitton luxury travel trunks. The owners can store their home furnishings in two steroidal “suitcases” and unpack them as they need them. One can serve as a folding screen to divide the bedroom from the rest of the space and contains, among other things, the double bed, a mirror and two night tables, each with as reading lamp. The other contains the kitchen, including a table, the pantry and a sofa.

Small places are also showing up on the mass market. Abito’s “intelligent living spaces” apartments on the outskirts of England’s Manchester city centre and Salford Quays start at £90,000. Measuring 353 sq ft, each has a central pod containing the kitchen, bathroom and utility/storage area. This fixture cleverly divides the bedroom, which has a full-sized fold-away bed, and the living area.

In the US, Marianne Cusato’s Katrina Cottages, which start at 308 sq ft and began life as emergency accommodation after Hurricane Katrina, sell in kit form at Lowe home centres around the country. A high-end alternative is the pre-prefabricated Micro Compact Home (M-CH), which sells for €34,000. This state-of-the-art unit is developed by Richard Horden from the UK’s Horden Cherry Lee Architects and a team at Munich Technical University. At just 8ft 8ins wide and 6ft 6ins high, it is primarily designed for short stays, although Horden says the 2005 prototype, built as student accommodation, continues to house three of the original occupants and many others have stayed for a year or more.

I can see why. The M-CH, which takes its inspiration from the aviation industry, successfully condenses the comforts of home, without any of the feeling of confinement you might expect. Large windows borrow outdoor views; dual-purpose features reduce the need for more furnishings; and the latest in technology adds a touch of luxury that puts paid to any suspicion about being in an inferior domain.

Tiny homes, of course, have long acted as places of inspiration. Author Henry David Thoreau lived in a hut at Walden Pond; post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin worked in one when he was in French Polynesia; the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote many of his works in a cabin. These days these pint-sized dwellings are inspiring people to change the way they live, mainly because they want to reduce their impact on our fragile environment and simplify their life. Small houses need less land; they use fewer materials and furnishings, less power and water and produce less waste.

Another attraction is cost. With world economies faltering and real estate prices still relatively high, especially in more sought-after city centres, they can provide the budget conscious with an affordable entry point into the real estate market. Johnson, for example, who built his own cottage for mainly environmental reasons, spent just $15,000.

There are several things that make small possible. Not only does the decline of the extended family mean we need less space (according to Euromonitor International, the average number of occupants per household in the US and western Europe has dropped from three in 1980 to 2.6 today) but we’re also spending more time outside the home, either at work or at play, and our mobile lifestyle means we’re more accustomed to spending time in compact spaces such as cars, aeroplanes, trains and hotel rooms.

Alongside this change is the extraordinary innovation in design and technology. Not only are the products in our lives getting smaller and better, they’re also smarter. Beds can turn into sofas; benchtops into tables; microwaves into cooktops.

“Before today, you couldn’t live small without a great deal of sacrifice,” Johnson says. “But now we no longer need 3,000 sq ft to live comfortably.”

Perhaps, as Horden says, small houses are perfect for these challenging times. All we need to do is learn to live well with less.