Americans live in a country in which bigger is often supposed to be better. Perhaps this is why our homes, like our food portions, waistlines, and debt, continue to expand…But the rise of the McMansion–and its attendant conspicuous consumption–has also helped to create the burgeoning tiny house movement, which extols the virtues of living smaller. Like Henry David Thoreau, who built his own 150 square-foot cabin on Walden Pond in the 1840s, most tiny house aficionados cite the sheer satisfaction of paring down to the basics, choosing, as he put it, “to front only the essential facts of life.”