Long before "tiny home" became a hashtag, British designer and Grand Designs host Kevin McCloud was already living the trend himself. For the 2012 Channel 4 series Man Made Home, which aired from September 23 to October 13, 2012, McCloud set out to build a small, off-grid cabin on a plot of Somerset woodland, using little more than his own trees and other people's leftover materials. According to a Virginia Tech dissertation by researcher Maria Saxton, which surveyed 80 U.S. tiny-home downsizers, participants' ecological footprints fell by an average of 45 percent after the move. That may help explain why McCloud's shed still feels relevant more than a decade later.
A shed built from trees and trash
McCloud's first cabin followed a rule that every material had to come from his own land or from something someone else had thrown away. He cut down two oak trees to build the frame, used an old truck frame as the base, and constructed the doors, windows, and fixtures from the discarded materials he collected during his journey. It was small, self-made, and off the grid, the type of simple project that would have fitted perfectly into the modern trend of minimalism before that word even existed.
Moving day comes with a warning sign
A year later, in 2013, McCloud decided his shed could do with a new view. He had the shed delivered to a clifftop near Watchet on the Somerset coast. Because the shed was designed to be portable rather than permanent, he avoided some of the usual planning issues associated with building in the open countryside. Even the journey became part of the narrative. During transportation, according to The Daily Telegraph, the team attached a sign to the trailer which read “Caution, shed on tour,” a small joke that summed up how out there the whole build had become by that point.
