Downsizing is the name of the game these days, but with the city’s tiniest houses not yet eligible for actual residency, a true microdwelling can be hard to come by. Fortunately, a house on Capitol Hill has you covered.
A Craigslist ad was posted yesterday for a house—-a full house, mind you, not a basement or apartment—-at 12th Street and Constitution Avenue NE that’s all of 252 square feet. The house has earned its share of notoriety: In 2009, The Washington Post‘s Gene Weingarten marveled in a column that it “stands out from the other houses on the block like a Barbie doll in a police lineup” and wrote, “You walk in to a living room the size of a kitchen, then a kitchen the size of a bathroom, then a bathroom the size of a closet, then … nothing. That’s when you have to walk back up front and realize that the living room the size of a kitchen is also the bedroom.”
According to Weingarten, it’s the smallest house in D.C.—-much smaller than the 371-square-foot behemoth UrbanTurf recently gave the same label—-and its owner initially tried to market its coziness before embracing its absurdity and marketing it as “THE SMALLEST TINIEST DINKIEST MOST RIDICULOUS ABSURD MINI-DEMI-PSEUDO-SILLYHOUSE IN WASHINGTON.” She apparently found a renter willing to pay $1,000 a month for it (after she bought it for $245,000).
But now it’s on the market again, and the price has gone up to $1,200 a month. Not bad for a Capitol Hill home, until you consider that an apartment for a normal human being at the same price per square foot would cost over $3,000 a month.
Is it a steal or a swindle? Take a look at the photos and judge for yourself:
