Small Spaces

Le Koroc is a floating paradise designed for enjoying summer lake life in Canada with minimal impact on the environment—handcrafted from the ground up (or pontoon base up, anyway) to help its owner “explore nature differently” with a solar-powered, off-grid vessel that’s half fishing boat and half luxury tiny house. Crafted entirely by hand by a Canadian woodworker on a pontoon base, this is a tiny home for the lake-lover in all of us.

When the thought of a wooden retreat comes to mind, it immediately accompanies images of solitude and a discrete place that blends in with its surroundings. However, this modern tiny house in upstate New York meets at least half of those criteria due to its bold structure that allows it to stand out against a natural backdrop.

If you’re anything like me, your Instagram feed over Memorial Day Weekend was filled with FOMO-inducing photos of friends camping out in nature’s splendor across the country—whether shot from the rear windows of a camper van or RV or from within the confines of a glamping resort. ‘Tis the season to rusticate and sleep under the stars, and these tiny glamping pods are the new objet d’envy.

Since exotic beach getaways are always high on the priority list (or at least, they should be), here’s a Greek rental house that you’re sure to swoon over. Listed on Glamping Hub, the dreamy ocean-facing tiny house is an hour and a half drive from Thessaloniki on a private beach in Paliouri, Chalkidik, also known as Halkidiki. The exclusive spot promises views of the Aegean Sea and soothing scents of pine.

Here to help you make the most out of your mobile lifestyle is Santa, Barbara, California-based startup Living Vehicle, an all-aluminum towable trailer. At 212 square feet, the tiny space provides enough leg and sleeping room for six people, plus it’s pet-friendly and comes with a lithium ion-powered solar system that allows it to go completely off-the-grid.

Equal parts charming and eclectic is a most fitting description of this Old Time Caravan from father-son building duo Nick and Aaron Troisi, jointly known as The Unknown Craftsmen. The team constructed the tiny house caravan at the request of a former client who wanted an entirely self-sustaining space. The caravan’s distinct personality shines through in its design features, which include a curved roof, custom woodwork, and round windows.

Here at Apartment Therapy, we write about tiny houses a whole lot. Sometimes, I find myself wondering if we’ve reached peak tiny house. Are these adorable little dwellings on wheels just glorified trailer homes? Are they destined for the pages of Craigslist in a few years, once the mania dies down? Or are they a reflection of a cultural shift in the way we look at our homes, where bigger isn’t always better?

The trend of tiny living is well, huge. Whether it’s municipalities looking to solve affordable housing crises, or individuals looking to live a simpler life in the woods, tiny homes seem to be the answer to nearly every question these days. Now the tiny living phenomena has inspired equally tiny, yet incredibly functional and beautifully designed, kitchens for modern living.

The multifunctional built-ins are just the beginning.

The latest tiny dwelling from New Frontier Tiny Homes just might inspire you to downsize – and write a few best-selling books in the process. Named the Cornelia after internationally renowned children’s author Cornelia Funke, the tiny house serves a three-in-one purpose as a writing studio, guest house and library. In addition to being comfortable and cozy, the Cornelia also features luxe design elements and amenities, a staple of New Frontier’s tiny homes.

When I saw the pictures of this apartment I immediately knew who the designer was, because only one person could make an apartment this small look this good. Parisian designer Marianne Evennou specializes in turning tiny apartments into tiny, perfect jewel boxes, and this little space, measuring a mere 18 square meters (or 194 square feet) is no exception. When you walk in the apartment’s front door, the first space you enter is the hallway.

The incredible thing about super small homes is their genius isn’t limited to their square feet. A space might be tiny, but it can teach you a lot. Constraint sparks creativity, after all. All of these homes are 400 square feet and under…and the folks who live in them have advice to share.

Any way you slice it, 269 square feet is just not a lot of space. But thanks to a clever design, and lots of smart storage solutions, this small Japanese apartment manages to fit in everything that’s needed for living comfortably—and look good doing it. Here’s how. Open shelving can be a nice way to display your stuff, or keep things you need within easy reach, but it’s not always the best choice for small spaces.

When furnishing a small space, it would seem to make sense to pick pieces that are small. After all, you don’t want to overwhelm the room with bulky, oversize furniture. But there’s one big exception: the sofa. In most living rooms, the sofa is the biggest piece of furniture, and the biggest design statement, and a larger sofa (that still fits comfortably in the room, of course) can help to visually expand the boundaries of the space.

Tiny houses are charming, and a great way to simplify and streamline your life—but the tradeoff, for many tiny house designs, is having to struggle up a ladder at night to reach your tiny peaked loft bedroom. Forget where you are in the morning, and you may just whack your head on the tiny adorable roof of your tiny adorable home. But the Escher, a creation of New Frontier Tiny Homes, takes a different approach: it has a bedroom you’d actually want to wake up in.

These “truly lovely” yet teeny tiny modular units made from shipping containers, currently sitting on Copenhagen’s harbor front, just might be what the future of sustainable, affordable housing looks like — for students and other young people.

So you’ve finally booked that trip to the ethereal island of Iceland. A quick perusal of a “things to do” list lets you know that the otherworldly Nordic country is jam-packed with geological wonders that you certainly don’t want to miss.

Manhattan has notoriously teeny apartments and I’m always fascinated by how people make them work. I mean, you have to be clever to figure out how to fit in a place to sleep, a place to eat, a place to hang out, a place to cook and a place to you know, store all of your stuff, all in about 300 square feet. Even more impressive? When someone figures out how to do it stylishly in about half of that footprint.

Although our generation sometimes acts like they invented the Tiny House, the idea has been kicking around essentially since the invention of the house itself, to be periodically rediscovered by people enamored with returning to a simpler existence. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau, who was then 28, began what would be a 2-year experiment in living simply and retreating (well, mostly) from society and its materialistic ills. He moved to the shores of Walden Pond, and built himself a tiny house.

As small space living gets more and more popular, the tiny houses and micro homes have become sleeker, smarter and well, taller. This skinny micro home was designed by Dutch firm Ana Rocha Architecture and was given the extra appropriate name, The Slim Fit. It looks sort of like a sexy Lincoln Log and offers 538 square feet of living space, spread out across three floors. The exterior is covered Ayous hardwood, which was laid out vertically emphasizing the length of the building.

Becoming one with nature is the supporting theme behind COULSON’s “Disappear Retreat,” a sustainable structure that completely blends in with its surrounding environment. Constructed to withstand extremely cold climate locations like Chicago, Seattle, Buffalo and Calgary, the tiny structure’s harmonious design is highlighted by various eco-friendly elements that ensure its living footprint remains at “zero energy, zero waste, zero water.

Living in just one room with no walls to divide your bed from the kitchen or the living room is not easy. And when that one room is on the small side, it’s even harder. This collection of stupendous studio apartments aren’t just mentioned because they’re stylish. They make the list because they people dwelling in them have found clever and beautiful ways to create visual divisions between the functional areas of their one-room home.

Generally speaking, when building in a small space, something always has to give — and in an populated area, most often the “give” is in sacrificing outdoor spaces, especially gardens. But one Beijing- and Austria-based design duo has found a genius solution in the plans for this “Yin & Yang House” currently being built in central Germany.

Designers continue to push the creative parameters of tiny houses. The most recent examples of their ingenuity come courtesy of the winners of Ryterna Modul’s Architectural Challenge 2018. The competition invited the participants to create a tiny house no bigger than 269 square feet, complete with a kitchen, sleeping and living areas and a bathroom. The other rule is that designs must have zero impact on the environment.

Forget the splinter-prone two-by-fours and rusty nail playgrounds of your elementary school years. The children of tomorrow are getting something a little bit more colorful. British architectural office Alma-nac is set to create The Upside Down House in Green Park Village, located in the city of Reading, England.

In the third chapter of Wuthering Heights”, the narrator, finding himself at the manor house of the same name, describes a room with a curious kind of bed: The whole furniture consisted of a chair, a clothes-press, and a large oak case, with squares cut out near the top resembling coach windows.

We love a good castle as much as the next person. But what we love even more is a really good tiny home. So much so that we started to wonder what would happen if we took the grandest castle dwellers of them all—six of Disney’s princesses—and reimagined their lives in modern day smaller spaces. It’s proof that living light can bring about a whole new world of possibilities for adventure in the great wide somewhere. (So, so, so many more puns to come.

One of the most pressing challenges of living in a small home is: where are you gonna put all your stuff?

In my dreams, I retreat to a cabin somewhere remote, perhaps the Welsh countryside. My cabin is austere yet beautiful, spare yet luxurious in its sparse beauty. In it, I think spare yet beautiful thoughts, and commit them to paper (always paper), like some modern-day Thoreau, but with more elevated taste. Slate-clad, my cabin stands out against the wilderness, like the simplicity of my new life against the chaos of the world. This is that cabin.

And just like that, you can reclaim your nightstand.

If you’ve ever been curious about what it would be like to live in a tiny house, but aren’t ready to give up your normal-sized house just yet, we’ve got good news for you. In a number of locations across the country, from New York to California, you can find tiny houses that are available to rent for vacations or weekend getaways, so you can try tiny house living on for size.

One of the challenges of living in a studio apartment, or in any space short on interior walls, is separating a space into different uses: sleeping, cooking, dining, lounging. It’s possible to do this in more subtle ways, like with rugs, but if you prefer to create more concrete divisions, there are ways you can make room dividers work for you (even beyond how you think they can).

We’ve always thought small was cool, but we’re glad to see that major retailers are getting the memo. Now Pottery Barn is betting on smaller spaces in a big way with their new brand, PB Apartment. It was big news when the major retailer debuted their first small spaces line in 2017, especially since it almost became synonymous with decor for big, suburban houses in the ’90s and 2000s.