Q&A: YouTubers Kirsten Dirksen & Nicolás Boullosa on Life-Changing Homes

Kirsten Dirksen and Nicolás Boullosa have been making YouTube videos for nearly two decades. The pair first went viral 14 years ago with a piece on a 90-square-foot micro studio in the Upper West Side, whose renter enthusiastically showed how she crammed all her belongings into wall-to-ceiling shelves and slept with only a foot or two above her head. To date, the 5 minute profile has racked up 25 million views.

Becoming professional YouTubers was never the couple’s goal. Both journalists, YouTube was just a convenient place to host videos for their website Faircompanies, focused on sustainability. And interestingly, just as the concept of tiny homes and tiny living started to become more mainstream, and many creators were able to capitalize on the popularity to launch TV shows and consulting businesses, Dirksen and Boullosa basically stopped doing videos on them entirely. “We’d rather try to find stories that aren’t being told,” Dirksen told me earlier this year.

The approach has yielded some true bangers, and a loyal audience (holding steady at 2 million subscribers). There’s the interview with Charles Bello, an architect of parabolic homes who has lived off-grid in Northern California for 50 years. And the profile of a family who built a greenhouse around their home in Norway. There are interviews about modular apartments and underground bunkers, but also ones about making homes out of buses, boats, vans, and of course, shipping containers.

Each unscripted video is unique, sharing a characteristic Handycam aesthetic that's compelling in its simplicity—a throwback to early 2000s reality TV that portrays the subject and their surroundings as somehow more real and authentic than if shown in more polished light. Worlds away from the glossy, high-production-value look of most modern vlogs and viral channels, there's a certain charm to seeing the two scurry out of each other's frame and ask questions from behind the camera.

Presentation aside, the core through-line in all their videos is the people, who have decided that a conventional living situation is unsuitable for them. Dirksen and Boullosa's new book Life Changing Homes: Eco-Friendly Designs That Promote Well-Being explores many of the most unique and inspiring examples of people who have changed their lives by changing their surroundings. I recently had the opportunity to speak to the authors about how they met, what made them start making videos, how they get such great quotes in interviews, and how a pair who have spent so much time making videos about other people’s living situations actually live themselves.

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I’ve been watching the channel since your 2010 video of the truly tiny Manhattan studio. Can you tell me about the early days and how your approach to subject matter has changed over they ears?

Kirsten Dirksen: It’s been an evolution. I mean, we were pretty early with the tiny houses. I don't think anybody was doing tiny houses on the internet. There were no TV shows about tiny houses or tiny living. Featuring small apartments started because that was a trend in Spain. We saw an article in El País about them, but no one was really talking about it. We did one video about them in the U.S. and then one of this “Lego” apartment in Barcelona, but I figured New York City has to have a lot of these. I went and found Felice Cohen, I just messaged her on Facebook.

Nicolás Boullosa: After we published the video, I remember getting a call at our apartment in Barcelona. “Can we talk to Kirsten Dirksen? This is “Good Morning America.”

KD: They were like “It’s a VIRAL VIDEO!” Soon, we started seeing more things in the same vein. The city did this whole thing about micro apartments. There were TV Shows about tiny living. And we realized, there are plenty of people telling these stories, why are we still telling these stories?

NB: Yeah, and some of the people who started making tiny house content around the same time as us actually became even more popular than Kirsten, because they are really focused on one thing.

KD: We did vanlife stuff for a while, too. But after a lot of people started to do vanlife stories, we didn’t feel like doing much of that anymore. We were just trying to look for interesting people who have found themselves in really interesting living situations. Ultimately, the connecting theme is what we called the book: the idea of a “Life-Changing Home.” It can mean anything, but it’s really specific to a person. And it’s not just a trend.

What spirit or idea do you aim to capture in your videos?

KD: Our goal really is to get people talking about their home as a way to get them to talk about their philosophy of life. By crafting a home, they’re crafting their life. Some people are really in touch with that. They’re really tied in with how they want to be as a person. It could mean living in something really small, so that they’re really in touch with the nature around them. A lot of people have told us “the bigger the house, the farther away you get from your windows and from your views.” Other people talk about how a really cluttered house keeps them from thinking and processing what they want to process. So the home is really an excuse to talk about some bigger ideas.

NB: We try to do this without using big words, trying to make people respond to the discourse. We try not to be pretentious. If people want to talk about big philosophical ideas, we let them, but we try not to steer them there.

What were you doing before you started the channel?

KD: We both come from journalism. I had been working at a television station in New York. Nico had been doing a lot of magazine work in Barcelona. I initially went to Spain to do some work for the Sundance Channel. I had an interview with Javier Bardem for a movie that the channel was releasing. I really just loved Spain and decided to stay and learn Spanish. Nico and I met doing a language exchange at the very beginning of 2004 and sort of just went back and forth between New York and Barcelona for awhile.

When I moved permanently to Barcelona, you can’t really just do television in another language. I would do some freelance work for New York-based companies, and be mailing 30 gigabyte hard drives across the ocean or go back for a week do to a wedding show, but it wasn’t optimal. It was Nico’s idea to start Faircompanies.

NB: YouTube had just started, but it wasn’t really a big thing. One of our local TV channels was making these mini documentaries, like day in the life stuff. I remember Kirsten saying she’d like to do this kind of stuff. But it wasn’t what the producers she was working with were interested in. So we decided to just start making videos on our own website.

KD: Faircompanies is a website about environmental sustainability, inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog, but also the DIY perspective that everyone has the ability to make or do anything. At the beginning, the stories were like “Worm Composting on Our Apartment Terrace.” “Green Hair Products.” We were trying things. Whatever we’d find or stumble across. We started posting to YouTube mainly because it was a cheap place to host videos. Eventually, it made us viral, but that was never the goal.

Does your journalism background inform your videos?

KD: Yes, but maybe not how you’d expect. I saw how many people planned their videos ahead of time, They would write the script and leave holes for sound bites. That is the opposite of how I ever wanted to make a video. I don’t really even like to talk to people before we film them, I’d rather have the conversation just happen. That’s where the magic is.

NB: Yeah, we get a lot of comments about this on our channel. Mostly from, let’s face it, young males. They’ll be like “these questions are dumb, why are you asking such dumb questions?” But there’s a reason for asking the dumb question.

KD: This is something I learned from the first television interview I did. I had planned really smart questions. I was working with this older documentary producer at this NBC affiliate in San Francisco who was like “You can’t ask questions like that, because you just answered everything in your question.” I’ve had to learn to ask the dumb question because it’s going to elicit a more honest response. My questions sometimes make the final cut, but even I watch it back and go “wow, that was a dumb question.” There’s one video where I was like “Oh, it’s a crane. It moves?!” Which is like, what? Of course it moves. It’s a really dumb question.

NB: But when people point that out, I often want to respond and say, “But did you like the answer?” Because the answer was pretty good! If your questions are too smart, you often just get a yes or no response.

KD: Yeah, it’s really just about uncovering people’s stories. Take Charles Bello, who’s spent 50 years living off-grid in the forest. He’s just so authentically excited about everything. A deer comes to his window and he’s like, thrilled. He sends me photos of the turkeys that come out to his window. But he’s also quite talented as an architect—he had interned with Noitre in LA and has done all these projects and photo exhibits—but he chose to live out in the forest. It’s so interesting to hear him talk about the patterns in nature and the harmony he sees. His life is really whole in a lot of ways. His little commutes through a forest path or something, it’s all part of his very examined life.

Is there a theme that unifies the subjects of your videos that you hoped to capture in the new book?

KD: We noticed that a lot of people talk about and think about a home as something of monetary value and real estate. You see a lot of pretty pictures. Your dream home is something you visualize, maybe with a picket fence. I think the people we interview and feature are people that have managed to factor in something beyond how their home will look, but really think about the element of time and experience. They have made homes that are built for who they are and who they want to become. It’s the difference between a home and a house.

NB: And it’s not just people who have these big houses. A lot of people we’ve covered over the years have a desire to live with the land. Some hunt, some like to fish, but all seem to have the urge to be real and authentic to themselves. Their homes are part of that for them. It doesn’t mean it has to be perfect and clean all the time. Sometimes it’s actually the opposite.

Your YouTube channel and the book are devoted to other people’s living situations. I’m curious, where and how do you live?

KD: It’s a good question! We were living in Europe for 18 years but have been in the U.S. for the last two. We’re in the East Bay of California. Our eldest daughter is a senior in high school now and she wanted to go to school in English for a couple of years because she wants to go to college in the U.S. or another English speaking country. It’s funny, when Nico and I first met, he was living in a really tiny place in Barcelona. It was like 35-square-meters? I was working from there all day. It was fine when we didn’t have kids.

NB: Over the years, we’ve managed to create this sense of home that is us, this sense of family, that can be extrapolated to different places. We are not naive. We are super lucky. We hold passports in Europe and in North America, which gives us a level of access to great cities with educational opportunities. We’ve gotten to spend a lot of time in many places with a deep pool of interesting things to do, places that feed creative people.

KD: We have moved a lot. I think maybe every three years? A lot of the time, we weren’t living in very large spaces. In Paris, we were in a tiny, little attic space. But it had good light and things were done well. One of the kids was in this extra space that had been carved out with a net bed.

We also spent a lot of time on the road. We lived in France for seven years and the kids had vacations every six weeks. We would take those and go all over. One time we drove from Paris to Ancona, Italy, then took the ferry across to Greece. Our car sort of became our home. We had everything it in, our little induction stove top. Even on the ferry on the little bunks, we were plugging it in and using it. We have certain things that we take with us everywhere.

Later, we did a whole summer in a Westie and got really used to cooking on that single burner. Even now, we still sort of buy food like we’ll be cooking it on that stovetop.

NB: Yeah, even after we’ve moved to this house in the East Bay. It’s a 1,200-square-foot house. It’s not super small, but we have three children.

KD: It’s a two-bedroom house. A fixer upper that we didn’t really fix up. It still has single-pane windows. But you’re in the Bay Area, so it’s fine. We converted the laundry room into a very narrow bedroom for our 12-year-old with a very narrow bed they are slowly outgrowing. And we converted the unfinished attic into an office and bedroom for us.

We’ve also started to tinker with creating our own cabin. It’s called "the biocabin." We wanted to create something affordable and made with healthy materials, employing a lot of the ideas we’ve talked about in all our videos for years. We talked with some of the architects we’ve featured over the years and worked with a carpenter who does a lot of CNC cutting. The final result has a cabin feel, but it’s not super modern or pre-fab feeling. We put one in Spain and we’re hoping to do one in our backyard here over the next year.

We also just bought some land in Idaho that we’re hoping to eventually put one on. But for now, we’re still dealing with permitting. It’s an old mining claim, so we’ll see what we can do with it. Maybe we’ll just camp on it!