When a friend recently offered her a gleaming Oxo potato peeler, Jan Angevine had to think twice about accepting it. Angevine is a connoisseur of fine design and quality craftsmanship. She once worked for digital design pioneer April Greiman and avant-garde architect Michael Rotondi in Los Angeles. Today, she manages the office and marketing for Brennan+Company Architects in Catonsville and its eco-friendly building product store, Alterego. The chic, black-handled peeler was a fine-looking accoutrement. But when you live in a house that is little bigger than the standard McMansion-issue living room, you're forced to make decisions. Thanks, she said, but I already have one.

Angevine, a stylish 64-year-old with spiked silver hair, lives in a 10-foot-wide alley house near Patterson Park. Her whole floor plan covers just 660 square feet. They make motor homes with bigger footprints (the average American home is 2,400 square feet). When Angevine moved in from an apartment in Tuscany-Canterbury, she had to jettison almost all of her worldly belongings. The cramped basement provides enough storage space for her bicycle and off-season wardrobe, but a house this small simply doesn't tolerate excess.

"It's one of the best parts of this space: It constantly asks me what it is that I need," she says. "I don't have to have two sets of dishes. I don't need three mixing bowls. I'm detaching from objects, and I feel much freer mentally and emotionally."

If this sounds a little Zen, well, it is. In a past life, Angevine was a mover in the world of politics. She ran U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski's office in Washington, D.C., from 1992 to 1994 before moving to Baltimore to work for a U.S. attorney. But in October 1996, after seven years in the pressure cooker, she walked away. "I put a pack on my back and spent a year in Southeast Asia," she says. She taught at a Baha'i school for tribal women, learned to meditate, and spent a month touring Sri Lanka on a rented motorcycle. She eventually jumped back into the American mainstream, but along the way, she spent several years at a Buddhist meditation center and a secluded retreat in the California desert.



Angevine bought her house, tucked into a neighborhood once home to cannery workers, for less than $100,000 in 2006. With a $15,000 lead-abatement grant from the city, she gutted the entire space, leaving little more than the original stairway intact. Robert Brennan and his colleague Carri Beer then worked with Angevine to retrofit the tiny house into an environmentally friendly, modern monastic living space. The process was tougher than you might think, Angevine says: With a house this small, "You can't goof off. It has to be planned like a little ship."

The microwave oven in her kitchen was made for a boat galley, in fact. The 23-inch refrigerator could probably fit in a boat. And both appliances are upstairs. "We took the first and second floors, and we flipped it upside down," Brennan says. In the original layout, the living room and kitchen were on the first floor, with a bathroom in the back. Upstairs there were two small bedrooms. Today, the bedroom, replete with folding Murphy bed, is on the bottom floor. The living space is upstairs, with a small living/meditation room up front and a galley kitchen in back, where a door opens onto a rooftop deck.


"This could be the new front porch of Patterson Park," says Brennan, sipping a cup of coffee at the patio table. The neighborhood surrounding the deck is a jumbled, miniature cityscape befitting the French animation film The Triplets of Belleville: Knots of power lines braid through a hodgepodge of rickety remodels and stair-stepping rooflines. A dozen other decks perch atop neighboring houses, but Angevine says she rarely sees anyone on them. "There's just no way to use the space," she says. "If you want to use anything up there, you have to carry it all the way up from the first floor."

Angevine, in contrast, just steps out her kitchen door, breakfast in hand. Brennan, who took home several architecture awards for the redesign, calls Angevine "the urban roof pioneer."

When the deck door and front windows are thrown open on summer evenings, the wind off the harbor quickly cools the entire house, which has extra insulation in the exterior wall and a reflective "cool roof" that keeps the temperature down even on hot days. Angevine says her monthly utility bills in summer are just $50. In winter, they're less than $100.



Asked if she would change anything, Angevine says that the narrowness of the house is limiting. "The same space with a more generous rectangle would be much more usable," she says. Still, she loves it—and even admits that, should she lose her resolve, there's room for another potato peeler. Sliding open a roll-out pantry cupboard in the kitchen, she says, "I have drawers I don't use yet."

—Greg Hanscom is Urbanite's senior editor.