But in Seattle, there is the Spite House. If you’ve ever wanted a home that would allow you to touch both walls at the same time while standing in the middle of the house, it is available for sale. For about $350,000, you can get your very own doll house with no rules to prevent you from painting it any color you desire.
The Spite House is one of the smallest dwellings in the entire city of Seattle. It is a single story with a basement on a tiny lot. At the back end, it is four feet wide. At the other end, it is only twelve feet wide. It is thirty-three feet long. That’s it. The front door is in the middle of the long wall. There’s a kitchen at the narrow end, an entry, a bathroom in the corner and the ‘big room’, which is also very small.
The Spite House is located at Twenty-fourth Ave East and E Boston Street, about a mile south of the University of Washington Stadium. There is a hedge, a swath of grass about the width of a kitchen counter, and very few small trees for landscaping.
The siding is stucco, and because the house is so small, that’s all you can really say about it. There is a basement, and a driveway descends into the garage down there.
Smaller than many studios, it couldn’t contain a good argument or a polite party. It’s just too small.
There are several stories circulating about where the Spite House got its name. One story relays that a husband and wife split up, and the husband, thinking he was pretty sharp, gave the wife the side yard of the their house; she promptly put up the Spite House to reduce the value of the house that the husband retained. The other story is that the adjacent house wanted the lot to expand his garden; the owner of the lot said it could be built upon, and wanted some serious cash to give up the property. To prove that the land had value, he built the house on the property. Either way, the Spite House came to be.
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