The tiny house movement is taking the housing market by storm, with small homes appearing all over rural and urban areas across the world. They are an affordable and eco-conscious solution to the narrowing housing supply and can offer mobility to an increasing population of young professionals. Tiny houses come in many forms and sizes – from micro-apartments and office spaces, to cabins on wheels and trailers. Similarly, the financing models vary, depending on function, local building codes, size requirements and whether they’re made as commercial products or private housing solutions.

The best option is to design and build the house yourself, using savings instead of worrying about interest rates and debt. Some tiny house manufacturers offer in-house payment solutions to their customers. Other options are RV loans, peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding. We assembled a list of 5 beautiful tiny houses built for different purposes.

#1 – Llano Exit Strategy

This micro-housing project shows that building tiny houses can lead to creating larger communities, which offer affordable housing solutions. The Llano Exit Strategy development comprises four private houses and a shared building located on the Llano River in Texas. Four families purchased the land and wanted to each build small houses with a communal space for group activities. They commissioned architect Matt Garcia to design the complex within a $40,000 budget allocated for each of the private residences.

The completed structures, each with an area of 35 square meters (350 square feet) has a streamlined design, low environmental impact and responds to the harsh Texan climate. Galvanized steel was used for exterior cladding to reflect excessive sunlight, while spray foam insulation helps maintain optimal indoor temperatures during hot summers and cold winters. The sloped roof is perfect for harvesting rainwater, which is stored in large cisterns adjacent to each house. Polished concrete floors and plywood walls dominate the interior, with repurposed elements used for various fixtures and fittings in order to cut down construction costs.

#2 – Kasita micro-homes

This is a great example of academia being a good place to experiment with building tiny houses. Harvard researcher Jeff Wilson conceived Kasita micro-homes as a continuation of his previous dumpster experiment. His new micro-housing startup builds automated, movable, prefab 33 square-meter (352-square-foot) houses that can be installed in unused spaces or vacant parking lots. Each unit costs $139,000, which according to Wilson’s calculations, comes out to an estimated $800 monthly mortgage not including land lease costs.

Because of their modular design, the units can be assembled and combined to form multi-family houses, student housing and office spaces. The key demographic are mobile creative people who are increasingly less interested in building real estate and paying mortgages, but prefer mobility. The house can move with their occupants as they change cities and pursue their careers. They can use an app to schedule the move executed by the Kasita team. Each unit is a simple glass-and-steel box that can be inserted into a steel exoskeleton that can be built in under a week.

“Kasita is on the verge of disrupting the urban housing market in ways not seen in real estate and development in 150 years,” Wilson said in an interview for Forbes.

#3 – Getaway

Harvard Innovation Lab startup, Getaway House, builds and rents tiny homes for urban dwellers looking for an opportunity to enjoy nature and relax. It offers an affordable alternative to conventional vacationing, and allows people to find great places to stay in rural areas near major cities. This is a great example of finding a market niche and innovating within it through design.

At $99 a night, a Getaway stay costs about the same as a hotel, but in a fully furnished mini-residence that comes with fresh linens, shower products, and kitchenware, plus coffee, tea, and a variety of pay-as-you-eat snacks. At the moment, the cabins are only available around New York and Boston, but the team plans to expand to other locales.

The company has recently secured a whopping $15 million in funding from L Catterton, a private equity group behind many famous brands.

#4 – Woody

Brian and Joni Buzarde decided to build their own mobile tiny home that could follow them wherever they go. Their 236-square-foot trailer, nicknamed Woody, cost about $50,000 to build. The couple, both architecture school graduates, decided to design and build the house themselves.

They bought a 26-foot-long flatbed chassis for about $7,000, added structural insulated panels and cedar interior cladding. The height of the house falls just below the legal limit for highway travel that requires a special permit.

The interior is simple and modern, with birch-veneer plywood used for walls, floor, ceiling and kitchen cabinets. In order to cut construction costs, the couple chose to leave all the plumbing and electrical conduit exposed. It took them about a year to complete the structure, which officially became their home in 2012.

#5 – Rural Studio

A lot of great ideas for tiny houses come out of architecture schools. The small size makes them perfect for experimenting with different typologies, testing the market, and learning about the construction process. That’s why Auburn University launched Rural Studios, an undergraduate program that produced a line of tiny homes that can be built for just $20,000! These structures are built through the 20K House project, an academic design-and-build program that offers affordable housing for locals and is evolving into a commercial enterprise.

“Our goal was to design a market-rate model house that could be built by a contractor for $20,000 ($12,000 for materials and $8,000 for labor and profit) – the 20K House, a house for everybody and everyone. We chose $20,000 because it would be the most expensive mortgage a person receiving today’s median Social Security check of $758 a month can realistically repay. A $108 monthly mortgage payment is doable if you consider other monthly expenditures. Our calculations are based on a single house owner, because 43 percent of below-poverty households in Hale County are made up of people living alone. That translates to a potential market of 800 people in our county.”

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Have you ever considered building a tiny house? Let us know about your experiences.

The post 5 Amazing Tiny Houses and Their Financing Models appeared first on Archipreneur.

High-density cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo are seeing an increase in the building of micro-apartments for single and two-person households, especially with the new Millennial generation which favors smaller, more affordable apartments or condominiums over larger houses. Architects and designers are increasingly coming up with space-efficient solutions that include flexible and transformable furniture, automation, and 3D printed objects. Developers in large urban areas are responding to this trend by building micro-apartment buildings that target first-time homebuyers and renters.

This micro-housing trend comes in various iterations from the slight to the extreme – from sleek designs by leading architects for middle income populations in developed countries to the hellish spaces of subdivided apartments in Hong Kong.

In New York, the groundbreaking micro-scale living project is nearing its completion. nArchitects won the 2012 competition organized by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to design micro-dwellings comprising units for one to two-person households. The 35,000-square-foot micro-unit building, formerly known as My Micro NY and later renamed Carmel Place, is located in Manhattan’s Kips Bay area and contains 55 apartments ranging from 250 to 370 square feet in size. The building features steel frames and concrete slabs, with modular units that are prefabricated off-site. Tenants will share spaces such as the building’s roof terrace, community room, lounge and gym. Other amenities include bicycle storage areas, storage rooms and lockers.

According to The New York Times, the monthly rent for most of these apartments will be $950, significantly lower than average for one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan, which is around $3,400. Over 60,000 applications for these apartments have already been received from potential tenants.

Co-living is another trend that is being tested in large cities. Following the success of its co-working spaces, WeWork has since expanded into the field of residential architecture. WeLive recently opened in New York, welcoming in its first 80 tenants – a mixture of WeWork’s employees and the company’s members. Combining micro-housing and dorm-like accommodation, WeLive offers small apartments of around 450 square feet for $2,000 a month as well as larger, 1,000-square-foot, four-bedroom units. The development is fully connected via an app that lets tenants use different services in the building.

In London, Pocket Living develops micro-unit buildings with affordable one-bedroom flats called ‘starter homes’ for first-time buyers who earn less than London’s affordable housing limit, currently £66,000. Pocket’s developments are close to Central London and are cheaper than the market rates. Their first development opened in 2008 and was followed by several other buildings in Camden, Hackney, Ealing and Lewisham.

Pocket’s founder, former investment banker Marc Vlessing, noticed the trend of building residential units on infill lots in London. Vlessing made an arrangement with local authority planners and started building high-density developments using modular construction. The company is planning to expand to other parts of the UK within the next five years.

Located in Seoul’s largest district, Songpa Micro-Housing functions as a small urban village that blurs the line between individual living units and semi-public and open-program spaces, adding significant social value to the complex’s reconfigurable blocks. The unit’s blocks, accessible via a single core, are arranged to comply with local zoning requirements, allowing Songpa’s architects to form a tapioca-like outer layer that permeates the main volumes and acts as a soft byway between public and private spaces, interior and exterior.

Two unit sizes of 120 and 240 square feet were designed with extreme flexibility in mind, both internally and in relation to each other. Operable walls, built-in furniture, and transformable elements accentuate the functional flexibility of the spaces while subtler interventions, such as the introduction of clerestory windows and extended sight lines, create an impression of spaciousness.

Micro-apartments are not a new thing. The concept of small living spaces was pioneered by Japanese architects back in the 1970s, starting with Kisho Kurokawa’s iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower  in 1972. Perhaps the most extreme version of micro-living can be found in modern-day Tokyo; one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Over the last decades, landlords have developed sharing houses, known as ‘geki-sema’, which are incredibly small living units that people use solely for sleeping and storing their possessions. These are in effect stacked boxes, are often windowless, and target young professionals looking for a central city location. These units cost £320 to rent per month, and include electricity and heating.

Product manufacturers like IKEA are also getting on-board with the micro-living trend. The Swedish company released a new collection of space-saving, multifunctional furniture as a response to a growing population living in small dwellings. Their ‘On the Move’ collection went on sale in 2014. “We were thinking about the needs of the young urban generations that often forgo space to follow their dreams in the big cities,” Gemma Arranz, Interior Design Manager for Ikea UK and Ireland told Dezeen, “The collection is flexible, affordable, beautiful and can be easily moved within the home to maximize the smallest of spaces.”

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Do you think the micro-housing trend is here to stay? How will it change our cities in the future?

The post Is Micro-Scale Housing the Future of Urban Living? appeared first on Archipreneur.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me if I could help him with the design of a small vacation house. His family has a plot of land with an old, ruinous house on it which he wants to replace with a small modern home. It´s size should be around 60 qm (which equals 645 sq ft) and the budget is 60.000 € (64.000 $).

Mmh, great I thought…

…typical tasks and struggle every architect has to face quite to often in working life. But I liked the challenge and the minimal approach and started to browse for some references. It did not take me very long until I stumbled upon a solid answer:

The WikiHouse – A project developed by London-based design group 00:/.

Since I founded Archipreneur.com I am always looking around for great ideas, start-ups and entrepreneurs in the context of design, architecture and city planning. This is why I was very excited and fascinated when I first discovery this open source start-up. So let’s see how it works…

How does WikiHouse work?

The WikiHouse is an open source building system which allows you to access and download a freely shared library of 3D models in SketchUp. This is smart because SketchUp is free and really easy to use. You can adapt the models to design your own house and generate a set of cutting files of it. The WikiHouse founders developed an unique SketchUp plugin for that.

The next step is to print out the parts from your house using a CNC machine. They recommend to use a standard sheet material like plywood for that. They are numbering all the parts which are going together without any bolts because the system uses wedge and peg connections.

A team of about two or three people without any traditional constructions skills and power tools will be able to build a small house in about a day. Onto the basis classic of a WikiHouse you can then apply systems like windows, cladding, insulation and services.

The proof of concept is already done. For the London Design Festival 2014, WikiHouse co-founders 00 partnered with ARUP engineers and The Building Centre to develop and build the WikiHouse 4.0 in central London. 4.0 was the world’s first digitally manufactured, open source house to be built. 4.0 was the first two storey house for WikiHouse, showcasing the reality of using the WikiHouse system for house building. The structure was built in ten days with a team of around eight volunteers.

The following video with Alastair Parvin, co-founder of WikiHouse will be really interesting for you to better understand the concept.

What are the next steps for the product?

In the moment the WikiHouse Foundation is working on a catalogue of different house designs. Anyone can download or buy those products under the license of Creative Commons from an online platform.

The Foundation is also in the process of establishing WikiHouse trademark badges. In conclusion, these badges will include WikiHouse Designer, WikiHouse Manufacturer, WikiHouse Certifier, WikiHouse builder and give individuals or groups certifications of their service.

The Founders are writing: “WikiHouse is a product of three massive trends: open design, automation and digital manufacturing – catalysts for the third industrial revolution.”

If the relevance for society will arrive depends on weather the proclaimed changes in planning and production processes of housing developments will be implemented. If so, the WikiHouse and its community could be a contribution to the change of existing production methods.

The future will show us and the potential is visible. I am excited what their next steps will be. Therefore, here are some links for further readings:

– Ted Talk with Alastair Parvin

– Architecture 00

– Space Craft Systems

What´s your opinion on the WikiHouse?

The post Social Archipreneurship: How WikiHouse is Making Housing Affordable appeared first on Archipreneur.