Brendan Batchelder and Chloe Barcelou inside their tiny house. Photo by Chris Saunders

Film set designers Chloe Barcelou and Brandon Batchelder built their tiny house on wheels themselves, curating every piece of their compact home for maximum charm. At their current location at a remote farm in New Hampshire, the couple’s “yard” features a homemade swing with an inscription, “I’m in the garden.”

Barcelou explains. “It was Christmastime and we had no money to spend on gifts, so Brandon said he was going to surprise me. He said, ‘I’m making you something that you’ve always wanted.’ And I knew he was making it out of wood, so I thought, I can’t imagine what it could possibly be that’s made out of wood and something I’ve always wanted? But it ended up being something I’ve always wanted—a swing—and this is a quote from The Secret Garden, which is my favorite.”

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The post Extra, Extra: A New Hampshire Tiny House appeared first on Take Magazine.

As any New Englander will recall, Boston circa January 2015 was a maze of snow. That’s where Chloe Barcelou, now 27, and Brandon Batchelder, now 36, were housesitting—living for free in exchange for caretaking and renovating. But under that blanket of snow, they were also hatching a plan—and trying to build something in another friend’s backyard, under a massive system of tarps. It looked weird. Weird enough that one morning, the building inspector trampled through the 4 ft. deep drifts to find out just what the heck was going on back there.

“This guy shows up and our hearts start beating really fast,” Barcelou recalls. “He’s all, ‘What are you building here?’ I think he thought we were building a shed or something we weren’t supposed to.” But it was nothing nearly so prosaic.

While small dwellings are nothing new, the cult of very, very small homes has been heating up exponentially in the past decade or so. With an emphasis on environmentally sustainable living and an interest in minimalism (hello, Marie Kondo), teeny-tiny micro homes are having a moment—kind of a long moment. And a tiny house (a particularly cunning one, at that) was what was developing under those tarps.

But the building inspector had never heard of them. “We’re like, ‘Oh, we get this guy,’” Barcelou sighs. “He walks in all stern, but then as Brandon was giving him the tour and explaining how everything worked, he wandered over to the ship’s wheel.” (Yes, there’s a ship’s wheel on the outside of the house.) “It’s what we use to hoist the roof.” (The roof gets hoisted. This is not your ordinary tiny house.) “And as Brandon was saying, ‘It’s kind of an . . . invention,’ the stern building inspector got a faraway smile on his face and replied, ‘It’s an adventure.’”

A cinematic adventure, at that. This tiny house (now parked on a remote farm in New Hampshire, not very far from where Barcelou and Batchelder met seven years ago) is one that grew out of the movies, quite literally. Both are film set designers, and were working on a movie that winter in Boston: Aimy in a Cage, starring Crispin Glover. “I’d built up a photography portfolio over the years, and got an email one day asking if I’d ever been involved in making a film,” Barcelou says. She hadn’t—but she didn’t let that stop her. “That was when we realized it was something we could do.”

Batchelder and Barcelou at home with Cosmos, the rabbit. Photo by Chris Saunders

Aimy in a Cage was the first film of their homegrown production company, B&C Productions, which has since produced two other films, with more in the works. It was when they broke down that first film set and found themselves with a lot of leftover two-by-fours that Barcelou had an idea. Why not build a tiny home, on wheels, that they could take around the country where the film jobs were? “And as this came into focus, we were like, ‘Oh, we can make this a portfolio piece,’” she says.

And it is. All black, with ornately stenciled steps leading up to a steel-blue, elaborately carved door, the house has an arresting presence. It brings to mind a nineteenth-century stagecoach, or a peddler’s wagon. Something out of Charles Dickens, or Lewis Carroll, or . . . something out of a movie.

It may be tiny, but it’s decidedly a home, with wooden pavers setting a walkway up to the stenciled staircase, and a swing set (which Batchelder made for Barcelou) sitting in the yard. On a basic flatbed, with nothing but two-by-fours glued together to make extra-long beams, they’ve constructed what Batchelder calls a hybrid timber frame house reminiscent of a steamer trunk, a steam engine train, or maybe simply something steampunk. Collapsed, it’s a mere 12.5 × 8.5 × 18 ft., but when parked, it expands like a pop-up camper via the ship’s wheel and pulleys that entranced the building inspector.

Opening the door is like opening a trunk full of treasures: it’s full of old Persian rugs, diaphanous curtains, antique chandeliers. Shabbily bohemian, the space feels riotous and kaleidoscopic, but care has gone into curating it. “When we moved in, we got rid of pretty much everything that wasn’t adorable,” admits Barcelou. Everything left behind is there because they want it, right down to the tins holding their tea leaves. It’s technically one room, but a person lying in the surprisingly airy-feeling loft bed can’t see someone sitting below in the living area, and vice versa; careful planning went into the architecture, and it has paid off. Not that they consider it finished. “Someday we’ll have a little fence—dare I say a picket fence?—and real stones in the walkway,” Barcelou says. “And eventually when we move into our real house, we’ll have it as a guest house, or use it as an art studio, or whatever. But we would always have the tiny house.”

 Nearly everything in the house is salvaged and reimagined. photo by Chris Saunders

They did it on a shoestring, finding scrap around in dumps and thrift stores and salvage yards, and that’s a huge part of the point for them. “Our rent is hardly anything and our cost of living is really low, so we’re able to take jobs that we care about,” says Barcelou. It’s also good practice. For their work as set designers, they’re asked to create entire worlds on minuscule budgets. “‘Can you make something that’s totally out of this world, that would not exist on Earth, that aliens built for . . . three thousand dollars?’” Barcelou throws her hands in the air. “And we’re like, ‘Okay! Sure.’”

That resourcefulness is their secret weapon. Barcelou’s other job is fashion editor at New Hampshire Magazine, a role she created out of thin air. “It’s a bit of an oxymoron,” she admits, laughing, glancing down at her muck boots. “Still. I was like, ‘They need a fashion editor.’” She smiles winningly. One can imagine how she pitched it. “There’s lots of cool stores here! They need advertising! I figured, if you build it, they will come.”

That same attitude goes into their production company—and into the tiny house. When they can’t afford to do it quite they way they want to, they find another way. Barcelou hand-painted the latticework ceiling. Batchelder created shelving out of repurposed chicken wire. Salvaged cabinetry became sinks, cabinets, desks. “Pretty much everything in this house is salvaged,” Barcelou says.

“The shower is all scrap metal,” Batchelder adds. A discarded Crock-Pot lid acts as a porthole in the shower door. “And this light”—says Barcelou, pointing to the antique chandelier that helps give the main living space its vintage, bohemian vibe—“We were actually looking for metal for our shower, and I found this at the junkyard for five bucks. I knew right away it would be perfect.”

“The space underneath the floor is future deck storage,” says Batchelder. “The floor of the trailer is a hollow cavity, about a foot deep.”

“So when we park, we’ll be able to pull out a deck,” Barcelou continues. “And it’ll have a little pergola, and that’ll make it three seasons.”

“Four,” Batchelder corrects. “I want to put a little woodstove out there, too. That will double our living space.”

Also in that hollow cavity happens to be a rather large rabbit hopping around. That’s right: a rabbit. “All his stuff is right here,” Batchelder says, lifting a floorboard to expose a litter box in one corner and food and water dishes in the other. Two holes in a raised platform allow Cosmos (the rabbit) to enter and exit at will. “He’s like our kid,” Batchelder says fondly.

A vintage ship’s wheel raises and lowers the roof. Photo by Chris Saunders

It’s almost like Barcelou and Batchelder are playing house, except there’s nothing imaginary here. It’s why Barcelou bristles a little when someone describes the tiny house as steampunk. “Typical steampunk things are pretend. They’re water guns made to look like ray guns,” she points out. But turn that ship’s wheel, for example, and a system of black metal pipes really does lift the roof right off the frame. This summer, they started upgrading the roof with aluminum panels, finished to look like weathered copper. At some point they plan to surround the house with a fire cage of metal rods and cables—not because it will look fierce (although it will), but because a lone dwelling in the middle of a field is susceptible to lightning. It might seem ironic, given that Batchelder and Barcelou are paid to create fake worlds, but when it comes to this house, it’s all legit: everything works, and everything has a purpose. “Nothing here is just for show,” says Barcelou.

There have been several offers to buy the tiny house; Batchelder and Barcelou have turned them all down. “It’s not for sale,” Barcelou says definitively. “It’s irreplaceable,” Batchelder agrees. They give away design ideas, however, and might be persuaded to build similar tiny houses for others. After all, they understand people’s longings. “There’s a whole thing about not needing so much space, getting outside more, not being a slave to a mortgage,” says Batchelder. “But I think deeper than that is solving your problems creatively.”

Living in a tiny house has its own issues, of course. “It’s not necessarily easier than living in a regular house,” says Barcelou. “There’s maintenance and things that have to be done. I mean, we have to compost the toilet.” But when Barcelou and Batchelder (and Cosmos) decide they want to move on to greener pastures, they get to pull up the actual stakes holding their tiny house to the ground, hook the flatbed to a truck, and—just like that—they’re off. “This has given us an enormous amount of freedom,” says Barcelou, looking at Batchelder and smiling. “It’s liberating.”

Chloe Barcelou and Brandon Batchelder–tiny house owners, B&C Productions
New Hampshire
Website

Top image: Barcelou and Batchelder’s tiny home. Photo by Chris Saunders

The post (Tiny) Home on the Range appeared first on Take Magazine.

The result for nine years and counting is the “surrealist cabaret,” an interactive, walkable performance set in the fields of western Massachusetts, punctuated by crisp autumn air, framed by the setting sun, and characterized by multiple takes in multiple media around a single unifying theme. Last year’s theme was “home,” a resonant, deeply personal concept that can be both comforting and dark. Members of the Royal Frog Ballet Corps scatter to do their various work and art for most of the year, but they trek back to the Pioneer Valley each fall to undertake large-scale performances and installations. Here are snapshots of some key members.

Sophie Wood

Wood studied theater for social change at Hampshire College, and the work she did then was overtly political. But around the same time that Wood began thinking about making art with her housemates, she had an epiphany. “Social change, those two words—social is one of them,” she says. “And dialogue is a huge part of how inclusive change happens. My hope is that this whole shebang is where artists can have conversations with each other, but it’s also happening with the audience.” Wood is acutely aware of how powerful art can be but doesn’t believe it has to be sharp-edged. In fact, at its most effective, its borders can blur. “I think there’s a softness about making things a little dreamlike. People can connect things.” For last year’s “home”—themed cabaret, installations included egg-based breakfasts and laundry hanging from a line—deceptively simple tropes meant to evoke losing home, not having a home, missing home. But there was no narrative, so audiences—and actors—were left to figure out what their subconscious was telling them. “You wake up and you’re like, ‘That didn’t make sense—but it all made perfect sense in your dream.’ ”

Julia Read

Read set the idea of “home” to music, writing a waltz. “The words were from the perspective of a house that missed the people that had lived in it,” she says. But she brought another piece to the cabaret as well, thinking about her mother who had passed away years prior. “I found a dress that was my mom’s—a beautiful long blue dress with flowers on it—and we hung it from a branch of a tree. I would go up to the dress and smell it, imagining my mom was inside it and what it would feel like to touch her and see her.” Then Annie Burdette and Molly Greene, two more members of the Corps, approached. “Annie came up behind me and took my shirt and began doing the same thing, except that my body was inhabiting my shirt, and Molly Greene came up and did the same to Annie’s shirt.” One didn’t need to know anyone’s backstory to sense the intimacy of the moment. “The audience was really quiet. I feel like it helps drop me into being present, having the audience nearby, to see people’s faces.” On any given night, Read may recognize some audience members, but not all—and she likes it that way. More than anything, she appreciates the precipice of performing. “I love the moments right before. As the audience is gathering, people are bundled up and chattering, and the light is usually dramatic. I love those moments. It sort of feels like we don’t know what will happen yet as we move into this world.”

Chelsea Granger

Granger is up for almost any kind of project, but she’s most excited about the ones she undertakes with other people. This is not an accident. “My first few years [with RFB] it was hard to find my footing as a visual artist who makes smaller works on paper,” she says. “It took a while to understand what my work could be outside in a large field setting with big crowds.” But eventually she got it. Her project for “home” was truly collaborative—and truly huge, compared to the small-scale work she was used to. “I wanted to make a really big painting, a cantastoria, with Sophie.” A cantastoria, or “story-singer,” is an ancient melding of visual art and theater where a series of paintings are narrated by a live performer. “Eventually I made a huge painting of a vase of flowers, and Sophie wrote a prayer for flowers to go with it.” Because several members of the Corps had recently undergone loss and were processing grief in various ways, the prayer held special meaning. “It was about creating rituals, showing up for each other in the time and space. I wanted rituals, needed rituals.” Religious expression can be deeply personal, but many of the most powerful rituals happen in community—or collaboration. “I think that’s the thing. It’s not just your voice, your ideas, but your voice and ideas meeting someone else’s voice and ideas. Sitting alone in a room drawing is nothing compared to the alchemy that happens when people make things together.”

Jazer Giles

The natural, outdoor theater is central to the RFB experience, but Giles has fond memories of a rare indoor moment: a monthlong installation at the APE Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts, when the troupe created a boat-shaped stage in the space. “We spent most of the time building it,” says Giles. About a week before the show, they realized they still needed to come up with a performance. “I had built an artist posing figure, a puppet that mimicked my movement, and I hooked up to it with four coat hangers attached to my limbs with leather straps. I built a small bird outfit for him, and we made this event happen out of the ether.” Some performers might have been daunted, but Giles is less attached to the outcome, more interested in the process. “You’re always pulling art out of the air.” With its outdoor performances, RFB is “harnessing the magic of the place, distilling it, setting it up in a certain way—or just framing it. Of course, sometimes it rains. Often it’s freezing! But you can’t fake things like space. When you put people out in a field, 50 feet away from people, and put them in costumes, you can’t translate that to an inside space with a stage.”

Mike Gundlach

Gundlach began as the mess cook for the Corps, but he quickly found his role morphing. “Sophie asked me to collaborate to make an outdoor-feast show. The food was interspersed with two or three acts in between each course of people popping out of the ground and having dinner.” After that, Gundlach was both company cook and performer, and has been contributing edible art ever since. “We’ve made a pepper-infused, chocolate-covered asparagus as an aphrodisiac course that was served on spires. We’ve hung Turkish delight from trees for people to pick and eat,” he recalls. “Molly and I performed a piece with soft-boiled eggs and volkenbrat, this German rye bread that people would make in the fall and survive on all winter.” They garnished the peasant food with chives and edible flowers, then dumped freshly squeezed grapefruit juice on top and served [the dish] in small planter trays. “For one show we had a bunch of rain and made pizza in the rain. We just figured it out,” he shrugs. “If people can see you be excited, you get that energy.”

Molly Greene

In her other life, Greene is completing a PhD at Yale University in American studies—an interdisciplinary field that explores how elements in society intersect. One could argue that RFB does the same. “The themes of the cabaret are always threads that weave in and out of aspects of our lives,” Greene muses. “Sometimes they congeal into a single idea, but usually it’s a constellation of terms that connect, then get kind of carried off in various trajectories, then get rewoven into something we hope is coherent.” Greene’s printmaking work is solitary and quiet. “I’m kind of a hermit. Being in front of people performing . . . there’s a little bit of tension in it for me, but it’s also rich and nourishing. One of my favorite moments is when we’re literally hiding in a ditch somewhere as your next costume is being assembled or whatever, and the sky is doing something incredible, and it’s fall in New England. You’re listening with one ear for your cue, but you’re also just conscious of being outside, and there’s a heightened sense of purpose and consciousness and collective awareness of just being in that place. I have that moment every year, and it is always all-consuming.”

This story originally appeared in the June/July 2016 issue of Take, which is available here.

Royal Frog Ballet
Amherst, Massachusetts
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All images by Candace Hope

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