SEATTLE -- There's spite and then there's SPITE. And, depending on the story you believe, there's a home in Montlake -- a small one at that -- that was likely built with the capital 'S' in mind. 
 
 
 
 To neighbors the 830-square-foot house on the corner of 24th Avenue East and East Boston in Montlake is an icon; but what the home, known as the Montlake Spite House, lacks in size it more than makes up for in story, myth and legend. 
 
 
 
 The house, which is currently up for sale, was originally built in 1925. The listing agent describes it best when she says the original owner took full advantage of the pie-shaped property by creating a pie-shaped home; the back of the home is just 4.5 feet wide and the front is only 15 feet. But aside from its unique shape and size, what sets this home apart from its neighbors is how it allegedly came to be. 
 
 
 
 "I can't imagine why else someone would build a house like that if it wasn't out of spite," says Lisa Horton, the owner of the home. 
 
 
 
 Some neighbors tell the tale of a husband, a wife and a divorce settlement. Allegedly a judge awarded the husband the house and the wife the front yard; so out of spite up went the tiny home, by the wife, on top of her front yard. But that's not true, according to The Stranger. A story published several years ago by the newspaper supports a different tale, one which is very familiar to Horton. 
 
 
 
 "I always heard it was a land dispute," Horton says. 
 
 
 
 The story alleges the home went up after the next-door neighbor, who wanted to buy the pie-shaped corner lot, made a low-ball offer to the property owner. The property owner was so mad at the offer he built the house to get back at his neighbor, who eventually ended up moving. 
 
 
 
 Horton, who has owned the home since 2000, says with all its quirks - like having to stand off to the side to make enough room to open the oven door - the local legend must be true. 
 
 
 
 "Of course I buy into it," she says. 
 
 
 
 Eugene Smith, a retired professor at the University of Washington, lived in Montlake for 40 years. Fascinated by local history, in 2004 Smith wrote a book about Montlake's history, devoting one of the chapters to what he calls the eclectic collection of houses seen throughout the neighborhood. 
 
 
 
 "(The Montlake Spite House) was certainly the oddest of all the bungalows," Smith says. "It was the smallest, most peculiar shape." 
 
 
 
 Smith says he was intrigued by the asymmetry of the spite house and came up with his own version of its creation. 
 
 
 
 "What I concluded, since I wasn't able to track down any particular feuds or hate, was that someone came up with a design to fit the lot and built it so it didn't interfere with anyone's view," Smith says. 
 
 
 
 It turns out Montlake's Spite House doesn't stand alone. A handful of stories have been published from across the country featuring similar cases where a home has been built, added-on to or painted to deliberately irritate and annoy others - in many cases a neighbor or city entity. 
 
 
 
 The Montlake Spite House is currently listed for sale at $397,500 and is touted as the "perfect condo alternativein one of Seattle's best neighborhoods." 
 
 
 
 The home, currently unoccupied, previously sold for $239,500 in 2000, according to Redfin. ||||| It looks like such a sweet home. But once you know the history of this pie slice-shaped dwelling, you'll see why it's nicknamed the Seattle Spite House and you'll learn there are laws to prevent you from intentionally building to block views, light or access that your neighbor enjoys. 
 
 Washington State spite law 7.40.030: Malicious erection of structure may be enjoined. An injunction may be granted to restrain the malicious erection, by any owner or lessee of land, of any structure intended to spite, injure or annoy an adjoining proprietor. And where any owner or lessee of land has maliciously erected such a structure with such intent, a mandatory injunction will lie to compel its abatement and removal. 
 
 In legalese - forgive me - an act like that is called a "malicious erection." 
 
 Still, there are so many examples of cranky citizen's constructions to irritate adjacent landowners that Wikipedia has an entry for both a spite house and the less-expensive revenge, a spite fence. 
 
 Warring neighbors have painted exterior walls garish colors, posted unsightly signs and tried other ways to pique the people nearby. But it's expensive, and now illegal, to block with a vengeance. 
 
 The tiny Seattle spite house at 2022 24th Ave. E, which is now listed for sale at $519,900, was built in 1925. Stories of its origin vary, but all focus on serious payback. 
 
 The most popular rumor centers on a wacky divorce case in which a judge awarded the house to the husband and a sliver of the property - the 3,090-square-foot front yard - to the wife. 
 
 Some say out of spite, she squeezed a pie slice-shaped structure onto her odd corner lot, which dictated that one end only be 55 inches wide. In this mini mudroom, you can stretch out your arms and touch opposite walls. 
 
 The footprint widens a little in the cramped kitchen, but not enough to stand in front of the oven and open the oven door. The living room in the center of the triangle house offers more elbow room. Finally, at the end, the master suite is a luxurious 15 feet wide. 
 
 Hallways? Forget it. But there is a daylight basement/garage conversion. Buried beneath the main floor is a bedroom and bath that benefit from carriage doors that open to the outdoors. The center of the subterranean space is a cozy seating room. At the almost pointed, narrow end is an elevated platform with a mattress. Tiny house dwellers would feel right at home here. 
 
 At 860 square feet, the listing price breaks down to $605 a square foot, about three times the median in Portland. 
 
 That's pricey. So is the idea of constructing a wall or something larger to retaliate. Building codes and expenses squelch many planned spite houses. Instead, may we suggest calling a neighborhood mediator? 
 
 - Janet Eastman 
 
 jeastman@oregonian.com 
 
 503-799-8739 
 
 @janeteastman ||||| You might think that a little wedge-shaped house built explicitly to aggravate someone would be a tough sell. 
 
 Not in Seattle. Listed at $397,500, the home was just snapped up over the weekend, the real estate agent told Yahoo Homes, after spending only a couple of weeks on the market. "We had quite the interest!" she told us. (A local news story published Tuesday and picked up internationally might have helped the quick sale.) 
 
 Click here or on a photo to go to a slideshow. 
 
 Locals call it the Montlake Spite House. Legend has it that the home, on a mere sliver of a lot, was built by: 
 
 • A woman who won only a bit of yard in a divorce settlement, while her ex got the rest of the property, including the (normal-shaped) house they'd shared. Or ... 
 
 • A landowner who was furious when the neighbor who owned the adjacent (normal-sized) lot made him a lowball offer on the sliver. Or ... 
 
 • A traveler who, while visiting Germany, gave permission for someone to build on the lot -- with the provision that enough land be left for a second house. When the traveler returned, he discovered that the new house took a lot more space than he'd expected, so, “out of spite, he [the landowner] built that funny little pie-shaped home" as an obstacle, the current homeowner told KPLU-FM's Martha Kang. “I also heard that back when it was first built, the side that was facing the neighbor had been painted black.” 
 
 The house at 2022 24th Avenue East has 830 square feet, and it's just 55 inches wide at its narrowest point. The house is shaped like a right triangle with its sharpest point slightly blunted -- that's the 55-inch-wide edge, where a mudroom and exit door lead into the yard. The longest side of the triangle (the hypotenuse) faces the street, with the entrance placed roughly at its center. 
 
 Click here or on a photo to go to a slideshow. 
 
 Lisa Horton, the current homeowner, told KPLU that the shape of the house was never much of an impediment, except when she was cooking: The kitchen is toward the narrow end of the house, so you can't stand in front of the oven when you open it; you have to stand to the side. ||||| The House That Spite Builds On Malicious Erection, Everlasting Fights, and Fire's Power 
 
 Aaron Young’s ‘Tumbleweed,’ 2009. Courtesy the artists and Lawrimore Project 
 
 Spite is a step beyond anger. It happens when anger has hardened, you've polished it shiny, and you've fallen in love with it. Now in dangerous territory, you nevertheless can't stop, and you decide it needs a monument. What you do next is inescapably, pigheadedly wrong—and also epically right. You build a spite house. 
 
 There is a spite house at 2022 24th Avenue East in Montlake. It is pink stucco on the outside and only four-and-a-half feet wide at one end. Legend has it that a wife put it up after a judge awarded her husband their house and her just the front yard in the divorce. But that's not true. It went up in 1925; the next-door neighbor who wanted the sliver of land it sits on made the landowner such a low offer that he responded by building the little house right up in the neighbor's face. The spiter won: The neighbor moved. 
 
 The neighbor should have fought harder, because the law, dreadful downer that it is, was on his side. "Malicious erection" (I know) statutes in many states, including Washington, specifically prohibit spite houses, giving neighbors the right to an injunction or a teardown if the foundation is, say, poured in the dead of night (it has happened). The existence of such laws is a testament to the unstoppable drive to build spite houses, and most of the laws were implemented late in the 19th century, including Washington's. Older East Coast states had more time to litter the land with their spite. Skinny, weirdly shaped, charming, divided-in-half houses for spurned wives, rivalrous brothers, and affronted landowners "uncover our creepy and creeping psychologies of ownership," Will Owen writes in a new limited-edition chapbook called Spite House. They set out in the open the foul "swell of psychic things that exist despite never being meant to be placed alongside each other." They are fights that last forever. 
 
 Given the depthless cheer and facade of rationality that pervades American public life, there is something deeply calming about spite houses. They are homicidally sincere, wanton, and unwise. As in the case of Edith Macefield's Ballard house—which in 2007 she refused to sell for a cool million to developers, who had to build around her until she died, inspiring a rash of tattoos depicting her house with the word "STEADFAST" (after her death it was sold, but not to the original developers)—these houses are volcanoes of meaning, like heroes or great works of art. They're a terrific—maybe a little too terrific—premise for an art show. The show is spending this month at Lawrimore Project, curated by Yoko Ott and Jessica Powers. (The Spite House chapbook is part of Spite House the show.) It is both a fascination and a disappointment, maybe inevitably. Little of the art on display has the bilious, committed power of an actual spite house (and much of it seems peculiarly impersonally motivated) or the ability to compete with an odd and unexpected intervention: nature's own fury. 
 
 What happened is that precisely on the eve of the show's opening, a house caught on fire in the side courtyard of the gallery. The house was a work of art called There Goes the Neighborhood by the performance trio SuttonBeresCuller, and the only thing convincing about their claim that this wasn't a performance was the fact that they seemed genuinely glum—and that the facade of the gallery itself was broadly singed, its windows blasted out, its insulation melted into a crawling still-life. Boxes full of an entire earlier exhibition, held inches away in storage inside, were nearly decimated. "At first we thought, maybe? Maybe an artist broke in and did this? But arson is not painting a corner black or something. Arson is going too far," curator Powers said later. (The police suspect somebody homeless stole into the open house—maybe not for the first time? It has sat there for months—and accidentally set it on fire.) The remaining visual spectacle is incredibly beautiful (meant both ways, as in very beautiful and beautiful in particular because it is not quite believable). 
 
 Now, an act of god and poverty does not provide grounds for fair criticism, but in this case it embodies a level of intensity that is as difficult to achieve in art as it is in life. Spite House is a smart show that succeeds best when it displays less good judgment. As much as I dislike New York artist Aaron Young's cocky, Viacom-scaled, I-make-paintings-with-motorcycles-in-an-arena bullshit, his tumble­weed made of a crumpled-up chain-link fence plated in 24-karat gold—and his intact 24-karat fence obscuring a video by Vancouver's Andrew Dadson—hit exactly the right snarling but formalized tone. Spite houses, after all, are not instantaneous ejaculations: They take formal planning. 
 
 When Dadson goes creeping across the roofs of his neighbors' houses in his slightly slowed-down 2005 video, it's a perfect encapsulation of what seethes and seeps through every neighborhood, so invisible and yet so visible. From inside these houses, you might hear his faint steps or you might not—but outside, Dadson is plain as day. The photographs of sections of his neighbors' lawns that he's guerrilla-spray-painted black feel easier, less unlikely, less haunting (though the image of a white picket fence in blackface is a satisfying symbol). I love his white roses set in a vase of black ink: They absorb the ink like a disease, the petals taking on black spots, then the dots join, and eventually the rot becomes mournfully complete. It's not spiteful; it's gothic and melancholy. 
 
 Not all the spite is as literal or as contained as Dadson's boundary-stompings. The artworks in the show (as in any group show) spite each other, as with Young's partial blockage of the view of Dadson's video; or they spite you, the viewer. Miami artist Bert Rodriguez's thick white wall—an ongoing and rather heartwarming project wherein he builds white walls with his father, who cannot understand why his son must be an artist, in various locations—is here turned mean. It is the precise width of the gallery's extrawide double door, so the show rebuffs you with a big white nothing. Sutton­BeresCuller spited the viewer by blocking the entrance to the white-cube gallery, which people seem to miss entirely, rendering the spite rather ineffectual. 
 
 On your way up to the door, you probably missed Matt Browning's contribution: the Seattle artist painted black the pink sections of the gallery's exterior, spiting the architects, two other Seattle artists: Lead Pencil Studio. Christian Kliegel spited them, too, and the gallery's owner, Scott Lawrimore. Kliegel, of Vancouver, broke into the gallery one night before the show was up. He took a look around and made drawings that were then added as tape marks on the floor for his suggested redesign of their space. 
 
 Eli Hansen and Herman Beans are spiting the human attempt to spite death with neatness (I think). They made a messy, dirty coffin-house with windows and a bookshelf (the inverse of SuttonBeresCuller's paranoically sterile Homesick, not in this show). They thought people would rummage through the blankets (which I recommend), but people haven't. 
 
 What we have here are good artworks not equally served or activated by the theme. They're sort of... spited. In the eternal property war between curators and artists, curators can count this spite house as their own. Which, in a weird way, works. ||||| A property owner who illegally demolished a 1936 Twin Peaks house designed by a renowned modernist must rebuild an exact replica of the home rather than the much larger structure the property owner had proposed replacing it with, the City Planning Commission ruled this week. 
 
 Read the latest on this story here. 
 
 In a unanimous 5-0 vote late Thursday night, the commission also ordered that the property owner — Ross Johnston, through his 49 Hopkins LLC — include a sidewalk plaque telling the story of the original house designed by architect Richard Neutra, the demolition and the replica. 
 
 The commission directive, unprecedented in San Francisco, comes more than a year after the home at 49 Hopkins Ave., known as the Largent House, was almost entirely knocked down. All that remained of the white, two-story redwood-and-concrete-block home was a garage door and frame. 
 
 Johnston had received planning permission only to remodel with a design that would have largely kept the first floor of the existing home intact. 
 
 Two months after the demolition, Johnston applied for a retroactive demolition permit and for permission to construct a new home that would increase the size from about 1,300 square feet to nearly 4,000 square feet. 
 
 The case attracted attention because Neutra is considered one of the most important modern architects and because it highlighted the trend of speculators illegally razing modest homes with the intention of replacing them with mega-homes. The new houses can fetch upward of $5 million, double or triple the price of an average house in already expensive San Francisco. 
 
 Planning Commissioner Dennis Richards said he hopes the commission’s action in the 49 Hopkins case will send a message to speculators accustomed to ignoring city planning and building laws with few or no repercussions. 
 
 “We are tired of seeing this happening in the city and are drawing a line in the sand,” said Richards. “You can have all the rules in the world, but if you don’t enforce them, the rules are worthless.” 
 
 Justin Zucker, attorney for the property owner, said that 49 Hopkins LLC is not a real estate speculation group but an entity solely owned by Johnston, who had hoped to move his family into the larger home. Johnston’s LLC bought the home for $1.7 million in 2017. 
 
 Johnston briefly addressed the commission, saying that he had bought the property “as a family home that would enable my family of six to move back to San Francisco,” he said. 
 
 “I have been stuck in limbo for over a year,” he said. 
 
 Zucker argued that the historic integrity of the Neutra design had been erased over time — first in a 1968 fire and later in a series of remodels in the 1980s and 1990s. The approved 2014 plan — proposed by a previous owner — allowed for the removal of most of the existing structure, he said. “We acknowledge and apologize for the fact that a small portion of the work exceeded the scope in the approved plans,” he said, adding that the decision was made “for life-safety reasons.” 
 
 The decision comes a few days after Supervisor Aaron Peskin introduced legislation designed to crack down on illegal demolitions. That bill, the Housing Preservation and Expansion Reform Act, increases fines for illegal demolitions and requires a conditional use authorization for any home expansion that increases the square footage by more than 10 percent. 
 
 Peskin said that he was “very impressed” by the Planning Commission’s vote. 
 
 “The fact that it was a unanimous vote should send a message to everyone that is playing fast and loose that the game is over,” said Peskin. “We want to preserve iconic, historic structures, but even more important, we want to protect our reservoir of more affordable housing stock. You want a 1,300-square-foot house to be worth what a 1,300-square-foot house is worth, rather than a mega-mansion.” 
 
 While replicas are controversial among architectural historians, the Planning Commission decision was applauded by historic preservationists. In a statement read at the commission meeting, SF Heritage Executive Director Michael Buhler said that approving the proposed project would have “sent a strong message that existing planning and building laws can be ignored and there will be no repercussions.” 
 
 “The question before you once again is whether a person can demolish existing housing stock with impunity and then be rewarded,” said Buhler. 
 
 Planning Commissioner Kathrin Moore said she is confident that a replica could be “executed beautifully in a way that would be consistent with the home’s original expression.” 
 
 Neutra, who did most of his work in Southern California, designed five San Francisco homes. The Largent House was designed for a husband and wife who were teachers and artists. Neutra was known for his obsessive attention to the needs of his clients, whether it was a multimillion-dollar home or a modest structure like the one in Twin Peaks. 
 
 J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen ||||| A 1,200-square-foot house is considered small by today’s standards. But one Juneau couple is leaving their home for something with less than 100 square feet of livable space. They’re hitting the road, but that doesn’t come without sacrifice. 
 
 Download Audio: 
 
 On the curb in front of a brown house sits a bookshelf, a suitcase and empty picture frames. Passersby might think the tenants are moving out or spring cleaning. 
 
 “We don’t really have enough time to do a true yard sale so this is our, like, piecemeal please-everybody-come-take-our-stuff-so-we-can-move-into-98-square-feet,” Kelly Tousley says with a laugh. 
 
 There’s also a sign: “Knock on the door for more items for sale in the house.” 
 
 Kelly and her boyfriend are getting rid of nearly everything they own to fit into a tiny house on wheels parked outside their rental. From the outside, it looks like a glossy white travel trailer. 
 
 “I mean, picture opening up the back of a U-Haul and that’s what we started with,” she says. 
 
 But the inside is more like a home with vinyl hardwood floors and lime green walls. They’ll pull the trailer with a truck for a yearlong trip through the Alaska road system and down to the Lower 48. 
 
 For such a small space, it’s remarkably plush. A bench folds out into a queen-sized bed. 
 
 “We had the conversation of, if we’re living in this and this is our house, we don’t want to be sitting on milk crates with cushions on top of them and feeling like we’re going to get slivers in our fingers when we touch the walls,” she says. 
 
 Electricity runs off solar panels. There’s a small bathroom separated by a curtain and a kitchenette but no running water. 
 
 It’s their version of the tiny house movement, downsizing and taking a do-it-yourself approach to home ownership. Many tiny houses are palaces compared to their trailer. But the couple needed something smaller and road worthy. It only cost $8,600. 
 
 “The coolest thing that I built to date was a birdhouse in sixth grade,” says Kelly’s boyfriend, Curtiss O’Rorke Stedman. “And to look at a box and say we can turn this into a house, that was daunting. And that fact that it actually worked so far is great.” 
 
 Curtiss is a high school English teacher and musician. Last summer, he toured the interior for his solo music project, Cousin Curtiss. 
 
 “So when I got back, I said, ‘You know, this is it. I’m hitting the road. I want to do this full time,’ and Kelly was 110 percent behind me all the way,” he says. 
 
 Kelly remembers it differently. She thought he was talking about taking a vacation. 
 
 “Whereas, I think when the conversation happened, Curtiss more so took it as I’m hitting the road with him full time,” she says. “And I think it took a couple of months of that conversation to happen. Is it realistic for both of us to hit the road, for both of us to quit our jobs?” 
 
 Together, they decided it was. Kelly would quit her job working with autistic kids. They would sell everything and go on tour indefinitely. Traveling from Tok to Chicken, then down south through Montana and Michigan. 
 
 Friends and family had mixed reactions. But no one said it was a terrible idea, don’t do it. 
 
 “I don’t think anybody said that,” he says. “I think a few people may have said, ‘Why would you do that?’ They didn’t understand it.” 
 
 One of those people was Kelly’s grandfather, a professional builder. Kelly recounts telling him about their first big project. 
 
 “‘Grandpa, we’re going to cut in windows. We’re going to install our own windows.’ And he said, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t install windows in a trailer. That doesn’t make any sense.’ And I sent a picture of us installing the first window and he said, ‘Huh, they did it!’” 
 
 They completed the tiny house in eight months. Then came the time to purge all their stuff. For Curtiss, the most difficult thing to give away was his plants, grown from his great-great-grandmother’s clippings. 
 
 Kelly says it was her clothes. 
 
 “You know, I’ll look at a shirt and be like, ‘I love that sweatshirt! I wore that every home track meet in high school.’ But the reality is I have those memories of track and I don’t need that sweatshirt to hold onto,” she says. 
 
 Kelly is giving the tiny lifestyle a year. After that, she says she’ll reassess. 
 
 Curtiss wrote the song “Here and Now” about missing Kelly on tour. But now he won’t have to. The couple is setting off for miles of open road, pulling behind them what they’ll call home. 
 
 “I think it’s a blessing to be able to ditch everything you own and be able to take off in true nomad style like human’s used to be and go hunter-gatherer across the country looking for adventure,” he says. 
 
 To see where Kelly and Curtiss are on their journey, visit paygasnotrent.com
– From the front, a half-million-dollar home on the Re/Max website looks like a quaint Spanish Revival in the heart of Seattle. Head to the side for a different perspective, and you'll see appearances are deceiving. You're looking at what Yahoo says locals call the "Montlake Spite House," an 860-square-foot sliver of a house that's legendary even among tiny houses. The front of the pie-shaped home built in 1925 is just 15 feet wide, while the back comes in at under 5 feet wide, KOMO reported in 2013, the last time the house was up for sale. Eugene Smith, a retired professor at the University of Washington who wrote a book on area history, says the wedge-like residence "was certainly the oddest of all the bungalows" in the area. "It was the smallest, most peculiar shape," he told KOMO. And the story behind its supposedly spiteful construction is just as strange as its shape. Yahoo dug up a few origin tales, including that it may have been built by an enraged landowner to spite a neighbor for a lowball offer on the land, per the Stranger. It also may have been a revenge move by a long-ago owner, said to have given permission for someone to build a home while he was traveling, as long as there was room left for his own house, which … there wasn't, really, Quirksee has reported. But one of the catchiest stories, offered by the Oregonian, claims a divorce judge awarded the original, larger home to the husband, and a tiny portion of land to the wife, who then built this minuscule abode to be up in her ex's face. These days there's a law on the books against such a "malicious erection," which involves building a structure to purposely "spite, injure or annoy" neighbors by blocking their view, access, or light. (A secret of the "tiny house" movement.)