The Tesla Model 3 is an astounding achievement, but one thing baffles me: why do electric cars lack even the most basic tea-making equipment? I can’t be the only Briton to wonder why you would travel around on top of a 75kwh, 360v lithium-ion battery without having the facility to plug in a kettle. Or indeed power an off-the-grid shack for a few days.
I have become oddly obsessed with questions like this because of the many lockdown hours I have spent watching bizarre YouTube videos. One remarkable series concerns the tiny house movement, where people seek to simplify and declutter their lives by moving into little wooden huts. I have always been interested in tiny homes, since it occurs to me that, with a certain amount of cunning design, it would be possible to produce effective micro-housing of extremely high quality — spending less money on land (which accounts for most of the cost of urban housing) and devoting far more attention to the design of the space and fitments.
One of the dumbest things is the ‘spare bedroom’; in London, one might cost you as much as a new Bentley
Given how expensive domestic property is, it is bizarre how much space we waste. One of the dumbest things is the ‘spare bedroom’; in London, even a crappy spare bedroom might cost you as much as a new Bentley, and yet spare rooms spend 95 per cent of the year housing a stupid empty bed. In the tiny house movement, almost every square foot performs double duty. There are beds that fold into the wall, and storage drawers built into the risers on stairways.
I once asked a property developer why so few very small apartments were built.
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