In the 1830s, brick maker John Hollensbury built the tiny place -- 7 feet by 36 feet -- for his daughters, Julia and Harriett. The "lot" on which it was built actually was a narrow alley between Hollensbury's house and his neighbor's. Local lore has it that Hollensbury bought the spot for $45.65 1/2 and built the house because he wanted to keep his neighbor's oversized carriage out of the alley, where it scraped the walls of Hollensbury's house. Thus, the construction earned the nickname "Spitehouse."
Owners have come and gone through the years. The little house was a school for a time, local historians said, then home to a family who crammed both a bed and a crib into the small upstairs bedroom. Now, it is a popular stop for tour buses that pull up out front and idle loudly.
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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These days, in which the average house is 2,200 square feet, with great rooms, palatial kitchens, Jacuzzi tubs and California king-size beds, the little house is quaint in a fairy-tale way. But in its time, it wasn't all that strange. "There are lots of houses 12 feet wide in the historic area," said Peter Smith, who works for Alexandria's Board of Architectural Review. "That's the amount of space you can heat with one central fireplace in the center of the house."
And back in the 19th century, there were even smaller wooden shacks and shanties belonging to the poor and the free blacks who were just beginning to have a presence in the city, he said. Only those little houses didn't have quite the same cachet. And they didn't last.
Pfeiffer, when he's not measuring small houses or searching for them on the Internet -- the smallest house he has found is in Wales, and another one in Vienna, Austria, is barely the width of a front door -- rocks on his back porch overlooking Glover Archibald Park and watches chickadees, cardinals, goldfinches and woodpeckers at his four birdfeeders.
Yes, he says impatiently in answer to questions about himself, he joined the Navy because he wanted a "clean death," and not to die in the mud of the trenches. But he really wants to talk about small houses. He sends information about the tiny houses to newspapers in the hopes of starting a contest or exposing more of their stories.
"It's just, you see, the young people don't know about these things," he said. And who is to judge an old man's passion when he has lived long beyond the war he was so sure he would die in?
Sammis grew up in a rowhouse in blue-collar Baltimore, the son of a service manager at a Chevrolet dealer. He travels overseas and stays in the finest hotels for his business several times a month.
He doesn't know a whole lot of the history of his little house. He just knows what he likes. And he likes his little Alexandria house so much that he bought another tiny house in Mougines, in southern France.
"Everybody wants these big places," he said. "The real estate agents thought I was nuts." And he's looking at another little house on another Queen Street in Charleston, S.C. And he would love to buy a tiny place in Kyoto, Japan. Or perhaps Portland, Ore.
And who can judge the self-made appetites of a self-made man?
