One of the interesting things about the Hindi language is that the alphabet works very differently to the English alphabet. In fact, I think that technically it is not an alphabet at all - it is a syllabary. That means that Hindi symbols directly represent spoken syllables, and therefore is almost completely phonetic.

I haven't been blogging on this site for quite a while, but I haven't been entirely silent either. My latest obsession has been with tiny houses. I've always loved small spaces so these seem like they were tailor-made for me. At various times I've considered living in a caravan or a boat, and the place where I most enjoyed living was also the smallest apartment.

Dear WordPress,

Wood is beautiful. I love natural timber and I want to have some around me. My favourite furniture items are a rimu coffee table and a rimu bookshelf. But, I do think that natural timber is something that should be enjoyed in moderation.

Skylights are very common in tiny house lofts, and it's not hard to see why. For a tiny house with a traditional gable roof, there isn't really anywhere else in the loft to put windows. Just having a single window in the gable end probably doesn't let in quite enough light.

I don't really like climbing down ladders. The biggest argument I could come up with against having a loft was that you typically need to climb a ladder to access it. Going up might be OK, but coming back down would be more of a problem. I didn't really fancy having to negotiate a ladder half-asleep in the dark at 3am if I need to go downstairs to pee. But I've seen some very clever stair designs in tiny houses, which double as storage spaces, so that immediately felt like the right solution for me.

There are at least 5 different ways to configure a sleeping space in a tiny house:

Designing a home for yourself is quite a revealing process. The decisions you make about what to include, how much space to devote to different functions and how you lay it out are rooted in very fundamental aspects of our personality. While some of the design aspects might require some careful thinking and planning and calculating, others require us to really know ourselves and understand our gut reactions to certain things.

I've wanted to live in a small space for as long as I can remember. The house I grew up in was a fairly average 3 bedroom house of about 80 square metres. I grew increasingly frustrated sharing a bedroom with my messy sister, so when I was about 12, my parents walled off a small section of the living room to make a cozy new bedroom for me. At 2.5x2.4m it was less than half the size of the room that was now to become my sister's, but there was no question that I wanted the new small room.

I used to live in an apartment with glass walls. The walls on either end of the apartment were floor to ceiling, wall to wall glass. On one side, it felt fine, on the other, it felt a bit unsettling.