Small World

In 2014, Mary Caley, a retired JCPenney manager living in a condo in Laguna Hills, California, turned to her husband, George, with a proposal. Mary and George were addicted to Tiny House Nation, the reality TV show in which mediagenic people downsize, theatrically, into 200-square-foot cottages. What if they were to rid themselves of the burden of decades of possessions, Mary suggested, and move into a tiny house? At first, George resisted. The couple had three sons and three granddaughters, and he liked having a home large enough for the family to gather in. But Mary was dying of breast cancer, and she was the love of his life. That winter, they decided to look for tiny houses in Colorado, where Mary could buy pot for pain relief. Mary’s sister, who with her husband had been roped into the plan, went along.

One afternoon they all followed a scenic road to the mountain village of Woodland Park and came across a nine-acre lot on a wooded hillside with a few cute little cottages set at the base. The land was owned by a pair of real estate developers who aspired to turn it into a tiny-house village but hadn’t found any takers. One of them, Pete LaBarre, drove them up the hill, to where two lots sat side by side with views of Pikes Peak in the distance. The following spring, the couples leased the two lots from LaBarre and his business partner, Matt Fredell, bought matching 399-square-footers for just over $70,000 apiece, and installed a white picket fence around their shared yard. The houses were so small and close together that one sister could peer into the other’s window and see what was on television.

LaBarre and Fredell had paid $660,000 for the rutted, derelict hillside two years earlier, in 2013. The land had previously been occupied by an old motel and RV park for the transient and indigent; it was notorious around town because, in 2001, a group of escaped prisoners had been discovered hiding there, disguising themselves as missionaries by blasting Christian music. The land went into foreclosure in 2009, then sat unused for years, sliding into disrepair. After they bought it, LaBarre and Fredell cleaned it up, divided it into vacant RV lots, and renamed it Peak View Park, after Pikes Peak. No one took much interest. That’s when LaBarre and Fredell, feeling like they needed a gimmick, decided to rebrand the place as a neighborhood of tiny houses. They ordered three models from a builder in Texas, dropped them by the roadside, and waited for something to happen. A couple of months later, the Caleys drove through.

Mary’s and her sister’s houses were...