The seed of the Innermost House idea first took root in a very personal story. For twenty years, Diana Lorence searched for something she remembered from a time before remembering, a perfect unity of experience in place, time and mind. That search led her through more than thirty moves across America, from the Far West to the eastern shores, at last to Europe and the edge of Asia. It concluded where it began, in the solitude and silence of the woods at land’s end in California.

What would become known as “Innermost House” was a 12x12 foot cabin Diana built with her husband to consummate a wedded conversation between wild nature and high culture. There she found the unity of experience she sought. For seven years she lived in the woods without electricity, automobile, telephone, computer, or power of any kind, in a world lit only by fire.

Innermost House is now recognized as a long-term philosophical experiment in "plain living and high thinking," demonstrating that ideals of freedom and equality, reason and faith, simplicity, self-reliance, social and environmental stewardship, can be made harmoniously and sustainably real. Diana’s Innermost Life answered her deepest need for something we have all left behind. Her life reminds us that it is not too late to regain the paradise we have lost.

Diana no longer publishes her writings or speaks of her experience in public, but interest in her search and its conclusion continues to grow. What she has done in her way, we may do in our own. We each see something of ourselves in Diana's beautiful story. We all have an Innermost Life.

Innermost House publications have reached millions of people in over a hundred nations of the world. The prototype house and its story have been featured in House Beautiful, Fine Homebuilding, The Oregonian, Mother Earth Living, Green Style, The Examiner, Furniture and Home Fashion, Yahoo and AOL Homepages, Kiplinger, Tiny House Blog, Fair Companies, Kadinlar Arasi, Interior Post, and hundreds of websites, books and newspapers around the world.

Our record has been translated into languages from French, German, Spanish and Italian, to Turkish and Pakistani, to Japanese and Chinese. Innermost House has been judged the "World's Favorite Small House," the "Most Beautiful Tiny House in the World" and the "Most Inspiring Small House Ever." The voices of Myth and Archetype, Ideal and Spirit speak to us from the fullness of our beginnings, and have a universal resonance in our common human nature. 

The transcendental ideals represented by the Innermost House experiment stand upon the deepest foundations. Those hidden foundations have to be seen to be believed, and experienced to be understood. 

The Innermost House Foundation exists to continue Diana’s search, to explore the origins of what and where and who we are, to seek the living waters of a renewed and original relationship to life. The frontier we travel and map opens inwardly toward the coastlines of the individual soul. We are pioneers in creating a simpler, more sustainable, more beautiful culture. Together, we are sowing the seeds of a new world.

Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet"