Jack Sammis is a tall man who has a thing for small houses. On an impulse years ago, he bought what Ripley's Believe it or Not once dubbed the narrowest house in America, a wisp of a blue thing in Alexandria.
Paul Pfeiffer is an old man who has a thing for small houses. Pfeiffer, 91, has plodded through neighborhoods in Georgetown, Foggy Bottom and Old Town Alexandria looking for the littlest ones, and on hands and knees sometimes, settled matters with a camera and the old metal tape measure issued to him during World War II.
A blue 1830s house in Alexandria enchanted its owner with its diminutive size-it's seven feet wide-and has won admiration from another small-house aficionado in Washington
(Jahi Chikwendiu - The Washington Post)
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The two have never met.
Neither can tell you why he has the fascination, though neither calls it an obsession. Perhaps it has something to do with the novelty of it -- these old, small houses. Or the meaning of space. Or what lasts.
"All I can tell you is I liked it," says Sammis, 59, whose arms when extended nearly reach opposite walls of his seven-foot-wide Queen Street house.
"I don't know why I was interested," Pfeiffer mused recently, sitting in a rocking chair on the glassed-in back porch of his smallish rowhouse in Foxhall Village in Northwest Washington. Whatever the reason, he wanted to share his love of the Alexandria house with others. "I mostly thought people ought to know about it."
Sammis's two-story house is 350 square feet, about as much space as a large outdoor billboard. Its inside walls are the exterior brick walls of the two adjacent houses. The Sub-Zero side-by-side refrigerator and freezer barely reach Sammis's knees. In the upstairs hallway, two people must turn sideways to pass, unless they know each other very, very well.
"I once had two attorneys who were going to go around the world on a boat rent the house to see if they could be compatible in such a small space," Sammis said and laughed. "I know they made it here, but I don't know if they made their trip."
Sammis's ex-wife didn't get his thing for the tiny house. He had to jigger the divorce settlement to keep it.
Pfeiffer's wife, Pat, also doesn't understand. "I'm pleased to hear of his interest," she said graciously. "But I wouldn't go across town to look at one."
Sammis, who runs his own association and meeting management company, has other, bigger houses. He lived in McLean and now lives in a four-story townhouse in North Arlington, near his country club. He stays in the little house on the weekends and on holidays that he doesn't spend with his son, Jake, 14. When he's out of town, Sammis lets friends or clients use it as if it were a diminutive bed and breakfast.
Years ago, when he worked in Old Town, Sammis used to walk past the little house. "I've just always loved it," he said. About 1 o'clock one afternoon in 1990, he remembers, he saw a classified ad in the newspaper announcing that the little house was for sale for the first time in a quarter-century. By the end of the day, he had signed a $125,000 contract and owned it.
There's a challenge, he explained, in figuring out how to furnish such a small space. There's a sense of efficiency in learning how to live well in it.
The object of Sammis's and Pfeiffer's affection was built out of pure practicality and a dose of venal unkindness.
