Modern Architecturally Designed Tiny House With Amazing Hidden Shower

When designing and building a

tiny

house

, you have the ability to create a space that perfectly meets your needs and it never ceases to amaze me how cool people can be when making that a reality, and that is exactly the case with this very exciting upcoming

tiny

house

. . We're about to visit each other here in Portland Hi Carrie, how are you doing? Nice to meet you Brian, nice to meet you and oh my goodness your house looks fantastic. Thank you so much. The parking spot you found for this house is great. We are very close to downtown Portland right now and you are perfectly located in this front yard, how did you find this place?

It was really fortuitous because this house is actually owned by a dear friend, my friend Tom and I were traveling and we started brainstorming the idea of ​​building a tiny house and we had a conversation and I thought, oh my gosh, a house would be perfect on his property. , but you don't really say it to someone like that, but ten minutes later in the conversation, he says to me, I think so. You should put your tiny house on my property, so here we are and what was the initial point of your desire to build a tiny house.

I got divorced about seven years ago and in the divorce process you have the opportunity to kind of re-look at your life and re-evaluate what's important to you and I had been an artist on and off all my life but I was really in the background and when I had this opportunity to re-evaluate what I wanted to do, I wanted to be more creative. I wanted to pursue a more creative life, so what happened is I ended up getting laid off from work and in that process I received a severance package and I decided to take that severance package and sell everything I had except a few boxes in my house. someone. garage and traveled for fifteen months, blogging and writing all over Europe in the process.

I lived in many small places, one very specifically was this little Shepherd's Bothy on this island off the coast of Scotland in the Inner Hebrides called Iona. I lived there for a couple of months and I loved it and I loved the simplicity. I loved knowing that everything I had was in this backpack and I started thinking about how I could take it home and that's when the idea of ​​a small house began to be born in me and your father is an architect and you

designed

this house together, did you? It is not like this?

My dad is a retired architect, so while I was traveling he started working on some design. and when I got home he showed them to me and we started collaborating together so it was really a wonderful moment to be able to do something creative together and I would say 90% of the house is his creation and then I was able to add a little bit. It touches here and there, but it was a really wonderful time to work together on something and what size the little house is. It is 24 feet long and 8 and a half feet wide.

It has wheels, of course, and can be moved anywhere, but I knew that. that this place would probably be a place that I would be for a long time so you can see I built a deck and I really feel at home here and tell me about the layout of the house so one of the first things you do. What you will notice is that the fixture is completely metal and that was a very useful thing that I really like, like my father Larry, we really enjoy a stylized design and so we really wanted this house to blend in with this place that we knew that I would be in the city and so on.

We wanted it to be a space where people wouldn't necessarily jump over people we wanted to mix with these beautiful trees, so that's why I chose this chocolate brown metal, but I wanted the exterior to really reflect my own taste, which is

modern

design. On the front of the house we were originally going to do wood paneling and over the course of the design we decided to use the metal shapes to really create an interesting pattern on the front rather than using the wood well from the outside. The house looks so good. I love the way you've used all the mediums, but you've really broken the lines with everything and I'm very intrigued to see what you've done on the inside.

Can we take a look? Absolutely, come on, thank you. Thank you so much, this is absolutely lovely, tell me a little about the style and what you've created here. Yes, I am very inspired by Scandinavian design. I'm actually Danish and I love that light wood look on all wood. There's Russian Birch here, it's a plywood like a high end plywood and I decided to really use it for everything in the house so it would have a very consistent look and feel because in this room everything has to go together well so when I design, when I chose the colors, I had a very clear color palette and an idea of ​​what I wanted and I really wanted it to feel bright.

I knew I would spend a lot of time here. I work from home and live here. so I wanted to be able to have a lot of light and brightness, that was very important to me, and now we are in your living room, yes, and with the living room you need to have living room lighting, so I have LED lighting that we put in. Under the bed there is a lovely space to give it a really nice effect at night. The entire space has a double function. Most people who have small houses need storage space, so all these boxes are for storage, so I have my winter clothes. backpacking gear, indeed, that's my garage.

I have a box that's full of old photo albums of projects that you never get around to, so I have a box that holds the cushions, all the upholstery was done by my mom, so it was very It was a very family affair when we did this project, it was really fun to get everyone involved and then above us is your bed, isn't it? It's one of the things that, as you can relate to being very tall, the left option was not a Great option for me. I wanted to be able to have a space, a living room that I could stand in, as well as have a bed that I could sit on, and that would be a challenge to get a lot of space, so this is what we decided to get down with. a remote control.

I basically take the cushions off the couch and I can put the bed down and I actually have the bed down most of the time, this is my company environment so when I have friends over for drinks or dinner with friends, for Of course, I have my space in the living room available, but most of the time, when I'm alone, I lower the bed and have it down almost all the time. How tall are you really? I'm 6 foot 3 6 feet tall. 3 so it's very tall and definitely having this type of setup should really help this space never feel too closed off exactly for me.

I knew straight away that I was going to have to do something a little different and this is the solution and I think it's actually quite brilliant, you certainly have it and then here we have your kitchen and I can appreciate this straight away because, like you, being tall and having raised counters just makes all the difference in the world, doesn't it? So these counters are actually 42 inches tall, a normal counter is 36 inches tall and when I walk into other people's homes the contrast is just

amazing

because I'm so used to working on a counter that fits me and when other people they enter.

My house is like an Alice in Wonderland experience for them because they come in and the countertop reaches up to here and it's interesting because when I say I live in a small house people take a step back and look at me and look at me from above. down and you live in a small house and I say yes, but it's a small house so when they come in they say oh oh, I get it, everything is

designed

for you, so that was part of the process where I could contribute to those ideas even on the spot while we were absolutely building because you also did a lot of the construction on this house yourself, right?

I did a lot of the construction so I hired a contractor and he did all the framing and then I didn't really know what he wanted to do at the time but we got along really well and I really wanted to get my hands on it so all the work tedious thing that goes into a house, the insulation, the sanding, the staining, I did all that work, my sister actually works in construction or used to and she says you always need a punctual person on a construction site and I was the main one, so when he needed someone to hold the other side of the metal like we were, you know, bolting it to the side of the house, I was that person, so it was a super learning process, it was exhausting and, like I said to the final, really satisfying, one of the things I love to do is tiles, so I did all the tiles in the house and I became a tile expert, so having chosen the design and then implementing it is really satisfying and tell me more about your kitchen layout here yeah so I have a very simple stove it's a gas stove I actually use propane so the propane powers my hot water and my oven so this is a small and medium oven, so to speak, so I think I have baked a cake in there.

I've done some little things, you know, I predominantly use this stove, the sink is very deep, it's quite big and that was also very important to me. I have a rack on the bottom so actually most of my dishes dry right in the sink so there's no need to have an extra drying rack and then you also have a table here. Yes, this is my very multifunctional table, so I work at home here. It is perfect for two people to dine, in fact, you can also seat three. but it's also very functional and you can fold it up and put it away, so I take this table leg and it folds up here and I have a little snap.

I can also take this chair, fold it and put it down. I can also store it in two places right here and then I can also store it in my closet so when I have a party and I have more people here, this gives me a lot more room to move around since we were and then here we have your refrigerator and a lot more storage space. Yeah so I decided since I'm just one person I would have a smaller refrigerator and this works perfectly for me so I have a small freezer and lots of space.

One of the things people comment here is that I don't have doors. One of the things you need to determine when you are designing a small house is how much money you want to spend on all the details and I could have put a lot of effort into building this in a very complex way, but I was at the end of my construction and I was running out of money, so So I decided to use these wonderful containers from the Container Store and they have worked great, so I have my pantry here right here is a washer/dryer.

I like the fact that all of this is stored back here and away from the main area of ​​the house and then here we have her wardrobe and that's pretty much it. of storage space you have here, yes, I love the idea of ​​having a full size closet. Many small houses don't have a lot of storage space for clothes but for me it was very important to be able to access everything I have here I have my clothes hanging these baskets act as drawers for my clothes like my dresser and then right below I have all my shoes put away, there's not a lot of space but it stops me accumulating too many pairs of shoes and then

hidden

around the corner here we have your toilet and sink.

It's very nice how everything has been done. Thank you so much. I had debated whether I wanted to have a sink in the bathroom area, but I'm so glad I did. and this little sink fits right above the toilet and then I like the idea of ​​having the mirror around the side so it gave it a little bit more of that open and reflective feeling and I love it, it's very small but it's perfect. for me I call it my makeup booth quite a bit of food a little bit interesting so you've chosen not to have a door yeah so that's an interesting factor so there's a piece of metal up here that you can hang a curtain and Originally had it all the way back.

I had decided to make a glass door. I wanted to have a sliding glass door here, but first of all, it was again at the end of my build. The last pieces are very expensive. I had no idea how much they would cost. would be and I realized that since I am the person in the space 99% of the time I didn't want to close the space and make it look smaller, so I killed two birds with one stone, saved myself some money and decided to keep this open now. I had planned to put up a curtain when I live in this space for 14 months and I never got the curtain so if someone is here with me and they need to use the bathroom if they feel uncomfortable I just send them away. eventually I will go to my neighbor's house, I think I would like to put up a curtain, but there is no

shower

here, in fact, I have a

shower

.

I'm going to go ahead and show you, oh, that's smart, so one of the things that my dad had discerned while he was researching whether showers were really unused space square footage wise. He had seen a similar project in another small house, but it was a very small closet that went in and out of the shower space, so he thought about expanding it. that, we're going to make it bigger so we did so I have this full size that sits over my shower for most of the day and then I take it off when I need to use the shower and I have this really nice open space to use and then you have this complete curtain thatIt swivels to keep everything absolutely dry, so I have an extra wide, extra long curtain that just swivels around.

I mean, at first I was worried about water falling on the floor, but I have this little shelf and it works perfectly and then above us here it looks like you have a lot of built-in storage in a loft. I love this space sometimes it feels like the closet where you just know if I don't know what to do with something and someone comes. I'll throw it in there and the only thing I saved from my other life is a lot of artwork, not necessarily my own artwork, but paintings. The things I wanted to keep don't have much display space on the walls, so If I don't live in a small house in the future, I wanted to keep that piece of art, so I have it stored there and that's the only thing. that I don't use, that I just have it in storage, so you've been living in the house for 14 months, how's everything going?

You know I love it, it's very satisfying for me to have the space designed exactly how I want it, it makes living here a pleasure, yes, what was the budget involved in building this house? Yeah, so the total from top to bottom, including everything in here, including the upholstery, all the wood, everything was seventy thousand, including my contractor. I was very excited. so I can put my stamp on every piece in this house, from the design to the colors, cabinet shapes, and stain color. I had a lot of fun overseeing every aspect of this project and when people come in, I love them. to represent myself and I hope so, having this house really means freedom for me.

I honestly have more freedom in my life than ever because I have such a low cost of living. I have virtually no costs other than my house, I don't have a car, I paid off the rest of my debts, so it allows me to pursue creative projects that may not pay me anything, but may be my heart's desire, so some I am going to travel and document those things. my travels in my travel journal and then I write a book about it and those books are passion projects and I really believe that living in a small house frees up space, it just frees up space, it's ironic that the small space is freeing up space, it frees up space in your budget in your mind and your way of life and for me it was the right decision.

Well, this house is so beautiful. You've done a great job with the design. I love the way you've filled it with yourself and your art. and I'm sure this is a space that you would be very happy living in and thank you so much for sharing it with me, thank you for the price, this whole house is absolutely full of really clever design and what I love about the story is that this It is an example of true artistic life. Artistic living is about building a space that perfectly encapsulates your life and the way you want to live and here in this house that is exactly what she has done for you.