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I set out to write a book two years ago because I was frustrated with “small space” books and magazine articles. Half the time the featured spaces were tiny houses that didn’t give me much help with my real-size-but-small-ish home and the other half of the time the “small spaces” were people’s weekend homes or pied à terre. As a magazine editor, I also knew how much manipulation went into making those homes look picture perfect. I wanted to see what real people’s real homes looked like (albeit on their best day), and that was how I ended up writing my book Living Small. 

Now, there’s something else that I find frustrating: Portrayals of sustainable living. An eco-friendly life and home are treated by the media as either something that can only be achieved by millionaires who hire architects and engineers to build them a passive house or hippies who live off the grid on a rural homestead. Or worse, the only sustainable living content you’ll find is just a greenwashed shopping guide. I want to see what a low-impact life looks like for the everyday family or individual. I want to know more about the little habit shifts that might add up to a big impact if we all embraced them.

I’ve always been a bit of a treehugger, and I’ve spent my career writing about homes. I’d like to explore the intersection between the two in a newsletter (and possibly another book—someday) because a lot of the things I’d like to write about don’t fit neatly into the architecture of the sites and magazines I write for. 

So, today I sent out a very, ahem, beta version of a newsletter, which I’m calling ‘Living Small’ (after my first book), but also “living small” in a larger sense of living more lightly on the earth, having a “small” footprint, and making an impact on a local level. I’ll write a bit each month about one aspect of living a more sustainable lifestyle, including small-space design, all things secondhand, unfussy plant-based cooking, climate-friendly gardening, local activism, and my general ethos of making do and mending instead of buying something new. I want Living Small to be interesting and useful.

In each newsletter, I’ll have a longer “read” up top, but I’ll also share pieces I’ve written recently, articles that interest me, books I’ve enjoyed, and recipes. You can sign up here: