Since I was 7 my best friends have been Marina and Amanda, twins. And their older sister, Vicky, was my older sister’s BFF. We used to hang out together a lot as kids – the only disputes that happened were between me and my sister, and mostly we just used to punch each other in the boobs a few times and move on.
Years later, when we all lived in London as adults we used to meet every week with our children for Fun Fridays. We celebrated our 25 years best friend anniversary by going to Rome for a holiday together. Well spesh.
(I just want to mention my other bezzy too, Chell. We were naughty teens together and now we are nice, normal mums, rekindling that friendship we began age 7 at a camp. She is SO GREAT.)
Although I live a million miles away now I still imagine that one day when our husbands are dead (I’m not being morbid, statistically they ARE likely to die before us, okay?) we will all live together and drink Bovril and whiskey to help our rheumatism and have knitting competitions and when it gets really cold snuggle our weary bones up all in one enormous bed. Although we’ll be so withered it won’t need to be that massive. And to celebrate our 75 best friend anniversary we’ll probably go to Vegas.
So, anyway. You can see why I perked up when the head line “Best Friends Build a Row of Tiny Homes together” flashed before my eyes this week. Bestie Row, they’ve dubbed it. Bestie Row! A bundle of mates chucked their money in a pot to buy a strip of land in Texas and they’ve all built matching houses. Matching Houses!
And not any old houses either, but Tiny Homes. The democratic architecture movement sweeping the industry. In fact, right this very second, my other friend is currently building a tiny home for his daughter. The idea is that the design is so super efficient that whole families can live happily in them, they are also simply planned so that people can actually afford to build them. There are Tiny Home flatpacks, for people brave enough to DIY it. Many of them are built on wheels so they can be moved from land to land, meaning you don’t need to own your own bit of property. They take on everything we know about sustainability- they capture rain and sun, harnessing the elements. And they are beautiful to boot. In a modern, rustic kind of a way.
Here is the interior of Robin’s 8 foot by 24 foot Tiny Home on wheels:
Here is a beautifully designed Tiny Home Prefab:
Here is are the Tiny Homes from Bestie Row:
As far back as early last century people were seeing that housing could be a site of social justice or injustice. “Architecture ou Révolution” wrote Le Corbusier in 1922. House prices are currently out target for many ordinary folk, and poor people are stuck in crowded, leaky, unhealthy buildings. Tiny Homes could be just the very thing we need to make good, healthy, affordable housing accessible.
And just think of all the happiness that would explode into the world if all the elderly BFF’s lived together. I am SO IN.Viva la revolution! (Just maybe not the Bovril.)
