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.

The AEC industry suffers from a disproportionate number of male over female professionals. A large number of female architects leave the profession early on in their careers, with unequal pay and the tendency to be overlooked in for senior positions cited alongside many other reasons.

Given these issues, why should women consider archipreneurship? Wouldn’t all the obstacles that come with being an entrepreneur simply add to the prevailing obstacles for women working in the field of architecture? Although running an enterprise will naturally involve a certain level of stress, being one’s own boss in archipreneurship enables women to compete with their male counterparts on a more equal playing field. Archipreneurship, then, presents an interesting alternative for women who don’t want to climb a male dominated hierarchy of conventionally run architecture practices.

This hypothesis – that archipreneurship opens up opportunities for women and levels the playing field – is supported by the last two Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) surveys, which showed that female-led startups were more resilient during the 2008 recession, and that there has been a 40 percent increase of women (compared to 20 percent of men) going into self-employment since 2000. “An estimated 7 million female entrepreneurs and 5 million female business owners worldwide plan to grow their businesses by at least six employees over the next five years.”

The following 7 female archipreneurs prove that they can practice architecture with autonomy and passion by taking alternative approaches that add value for clients and communities.

Gunita Kulikovska

Designer and entrepreneur Gunita Kuļikovska works at the intersection between architecture and technology. She made it onto Forbes Latvia’s 2016 “30 under 30” list, and co-founded GO VR Studio, a company developing professional applications of virtual reality for the AEC industry. Their flagship product, Vividly, allows architects, real estate developers, construction companies and clients to experience and modify projects before they’re built. In 2015, Kulikovska initiated the project and exhibition World without Architect? for the third Tallinn Architecture Biennale in 2015 that allowed visitors to participate in designing a house in VR, customize the designs, and 3D print their creations.

“I refused to believe that the only mission of a young architect in this world was to design forms and structures according to building regulations, and being beholden to a constant, competitive environment – all for tiny fees,” she explained in an interview for Archipreneur, “so Go VR Studio answered the question of how to unleash the potential of an architectural mindset and create real value.”

Anupama Kundoo

Indian architect Anupama Kundoo designs low-cost modular homes across India. She started her practice in 1990 where she was engaged as a researcher and teacher at several prestigious schools, including the AA School of Architecture in London and Parsons School of Design in New York. As a female architect, she has been at the forefront of the trend to build easily maintained and sustainable homes using modular elements. Her practice has enabled communities to build affordable, quality modular homes that have a low environmental footprint.

For the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, Kundoo brought together a team of Indian craftsmen and students from the University of Queensland and the Università Iuav di Venezia to build a full-sized model of her already completed 2000 project in India. The team used ferrocement for the model, which allowed them to build the house just as one would do with Lego blocks. Kundoo is a great example of how architects can combine research, teaching and practice to address a specific issue.

Courtney Brett Bridges

Courtney Brett Bridges went to college at 14, got into Auburn University’s architecture program at 16, worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) at 20, and at 24 became the youngest licensed architect in the history of the American Institute of Architects. Instead of climbing the ranks at SOM, she decided to create her own firm, Casburn Brett Architects, in 2012 in Alabama, away from big urban centers where most architecture practices set up shop. Around this time, she caught the eye of lean urbanism evangelist Andrés Duany, with whom she collaborated on a new master plan for High Point, North Carolina.

Brett Bridges focused her efforts on keeping her business approach lean and bettering small communities instead of opening several offices across the country. “In some small communities we come in and talk about lessening parking requirements and doing natural drainage, with buildings that are right on the road and walkable,” Brett Bridges told Curbed. She continues to work as an architect while she acts as a mediator between local government and developers.

Rocio Romero

Rocio Romero is a 35-year-old Chilean-American architect and entrepreneur. Her line of prefab houses, LV Homes, come as flexible designs that clients can purchase for under $50,000. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She designed her first house for her parents in Chile, which later evolved into the LV Home and became the basis of her business.

Romero works with individual manufacturers to acquire trusses, wall panels and exterior cladding materials, and has the units transported via flatbed semi-trailers. By productizing her services, Romero has created a sustainable enterprise that allows for the streamlined production of beautifully designed living units. With Romero’s approach, clients know the value they get for their money as they can experiment with all the aspects of their house before it’s created, from layouts to sizes and finishes.

Tracy Young

Tracy Young is the founder of PlanGrid, an extremely popular mobile construction app that digitizes documentation such as reports, field notes, change orders and any type of document used during construction processes that would otherwise come in paper form. The app combines cloud-based storage with portable devices like the iPad.

Before starting her own company, Young worked as a construction field engineer on several civil projects. After experiencing the cumbersome nature of working with documents on construction sites, she recognized the need for a tool that would save construction companies money, reduce paper waste and maximize efficiency.

To establish PlanGrid, Young and her friend Ryan Sutton-Gee quit their jobs, brought on board two more co-founders, and put all their effort into building the company. The business has since seen a surge in users and has become the number one app for the construction industry.

Catherine Johnson and Rebecca Rudolph

Catherine Johnson and Rebecca Rudolph of Design, Bitches built their design firm by addressing a specific, growing niche in the architecture of Los Angeles. Their designs are closely connected to the food scene in LA and are infused with references to popular culture, movies, art and fashion. So far, they have designed several restaurants and food-related venues.

Both Johnson and Rudolph made the AR Women in Architecture Awards 2016 shortlist as a power duo that’s taking Los Angeles by storm. The humor and playfulness with which they approach design is embodied in their name. In an interview for LA Weekly Johnson said, “When we take our drawings to get building permits, our name makes the ladies at the building department smile.”

The post 7 Inspiring Female Archipreneurs Show How It’s Done appeared first on Archipreneur.

The architectural profession is dominated by service-based businesses. The conventional way in which architects run their studios requires them to reinvent their services with every new client. Specific requests and project briefs are mostly approached with a high level of customization that is time-consuming and inefficient.

In recent times, a new business model has entered the field of architecture, enabling businesses to become more competitive. The concept of productized services proved to be a superior alternative to the established business model, offering a faster turnover rate, more freedom for principals and employees and more room for scaling.

The idea of productized services draws from the field of product development. While services offer greater flexibility and adaptability, products are considered to be standardized and inflexible. In order to reconcile these two contrasting approaches, business owners can appropriate the efficiency and scalability of products with various levels of customization.

The idea behind productizing design services in not to make services more inflexible, but to systematize them in a way that benefits both clients and service providers by creating repeatable, standardized, and automated practices. This can significantly reduce risks for clients and establish trust through consistent delivery of reliable services. By standardizing prices and billing procedures, clients are more likely to perceive architectural design services as value instead of cost. The often intangible qualities of good design are made more transparent and measurable.

Firms looking to offer productized services have different profiles. Some are just starting out, while others are existing businesses with a healthy client base. Productizing existing business models can also be achieved by adding products to your offering which will complement existing services.

It all starts with the customer/client experience and feedback. Explore what new value a productized service would provide to your clients. Define which parts of your business are the easiest and important to standardize. You can use different online tools to automate parts of your processes. A simple pricing system can go a long way in helping you get new clients. Complement this with a consistent look and feel that make specific service elements recognizable.

MIMA Lab introduced productizing very early on. Marta Brandão and Mário Sousa started their business from scratch, offering prefab housing concepts with plan sets that can be ordered online. The structures are delivered together with a folder of drawings that may be necessary for licensing procedures, as well as fact sheets, and guarantees for fixed prices, components and finishes, construction, electrical installations, sewage and water installations, house permits, five-year warranties, and transportation and assembly within Portugal.

They decided to create a business around the idea of affordable, productized architectural designs. As they said in an interview for Archipreneur, software engineer Miguel Matos helped them to create a software that translates all the design information for the factory and simplifies the construction process. The software also allows clients to locate their property on Google Earth and generate an automatic 3D model of their future houses and its position on the site.

Finnish firm Workspace, on the other hand, is a great example of how productizing can be enhanced by focusing on a specific niche. The firm is a leading Nordic consulting and design agency specializing in workplace design and management. Their approach focuses on creating integrative design that combines resource, space management and information communication technology in order to appeal to businesses in need for environmental solutions for new, emerging organizational structures and business models. They create designs that supports various scenarios of use.

In an interview for aec-business.com, Jyrki Yläoutinen, Executive Workplace Consultant at Workspace, said that a large part of their productizing strategy was to focus on finding businesses and not individual clients. They were inspired by the gaming industry in which developers get user feedback very early and fast.

Their services include workplace management and consultation, support for change management and communication in workplace changes, interior design, and architectural design. With their services clients are saving up to 30% in real estate costs and productivity and speed is increased by 5-50%. The resulting business model led to clients fully understanding what they get for their money and the firm now requiring less time for sales and negotiations.

Eric W. Reinholdt took a more gradual approach to productizing his business by introducing products that complimented his existing services. He started his firm, residential design studio 30X40 Design Workshop after gaining extensive experience working for other architects and seeing the consequences of the recession first hand.

His business struggled until he introduced pre-designed plan sets that cut energy consumption. He established a fee structure for schematic and construction packages. Reinholdt added this new product line to his established service-based model, adding customers that didn’t fit the established model as driving force for his passive income model. His website also allows visitors to buy his influential books on architecture and entrepreneurship.

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The key to productizing architectural services is to replace the time-consuming model of billing by the hour with a more efficient model with set prices similar to those of products. Potential customers are easier to target, hiring people is more straightforward and project turnover rate increases. It is important to remember that productizing services is not a one-off endeavor, but a process developed by looking at what clients need.

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Again another project re-using old shipping containers. What I like about the project is that that create an interesting house type with an open space living area in the centre of the building. I really like the shape of the house which was designed by Arcgency, a danish architectural practice.

The most interesting part for me is that the founders created an architectural product, which they could market all over the world. I could not figure out how much the prototype house would cost but I will update the article as soon as I find out. I am curious if the start-up worldFLEXhome will really make it to mass production . But hopefully they will work on doing that. I like the idea and the concept they created. Read everything about the design below.

Design concept of the WFH House

(Describtion by worldFLEXhome)

The design is based on Nordic values. Not only according to architecture, but also design objects. These values are defined as:

• Flexibility.
• Build for people, human values. – Good daylight conditions, different types of light.
• Reliable (long term) solutions. – Healthy materials, recyclable materials, design for disassembly strategies.
• Materials that age gracefully.
• Access to nature, greenery.
• Minimalistic look.
• Playfulness.
• Sustainable global housing

Facts

• Size: 180 sqm
• Location of Prototype: Wuxi, China
• Architects: Arcgency
• Client: worldFLEXhome
• Photos: Jens Markus Lindhe

The WFH concept is a modular concept, based on a design principle, using 40 feet high cube standard modules as structural system. The structure can be adapted to local challenges such as climatic or earthquake issues. Online customization-tools give clients the possibility to decide their own version of the house concerning layout, size, facade, interior etc. The configuration happens within a predefined framework that will ensure high architectural value and quality of materials. Building-components are prefabricated and on site construction can be limited.

FLEX space

The FLEX space is the heart of the house. It contains the living room, kitchen and can be used for multiple purposes. Parts of the room are double height, creating perfect lighting conditions. The rest of the space is one story height, defined by the landing that creates access to the spaces on the second floor. In each end of the FLEX space there is access to the surroundings and daylight. The boundary between inside and outside disappears, when the doors open. This is a fundamental part of the design; to be able to open let nature in. It is a consequence of having varying requirements for inside temperature and definitions of what domestic functions takes place inside and outside.

Geometry

The geometry of the FLEX space is defined by the two rows of modules, and can easily be modified to specific wishes regarding size. The FLEX space has a number of possible solutions for subdivisions. Both on one plan or two plans. It can also be one big space, creating a lot of light and openness. The kitchen elements are built into the wall (into the technical module). It creates more floor space and also makes connection to water and plumbing easy. The kitchen can also be extended with at freestanding element, defining the work area of the kitchen. From the FLEX space there is access to all spaces. This eliminates square meters used for logistics. It is possible to make larger openings from the FLEX space into the rooms, again creating flexible solutions within the same system.

The work area of the kitchen

From the FLEX space there is access to all spaces. This eliminates square meters used for logistics. It is possible to make larger openings from the FLEX space into the rooms, again creating flexible solutions within the same system.

Bedrooms

The size of the bedrooms is defined by the half of a module (15m2). There are four bedrooms, and they can be used for multiple purposes: A parent’s bedroom, kid’s bedroom, workspace etc. Three of the rooms have windows on two facades, creating a mixed light. It is possible to remove the wall, or part of it, facing the FLEX space. This adds flexibility to the layout and shows the structural systems ability to adapt do different needs.

Landing

The landing creates access to the second floor, but can also be used as a space for play, relaxation or work. It gives the inhabitant the possibility to draw back, but still enjoy the company of people in the house. You are in the FLEX space, but because you are on the first floor you are drawn back from the action. It is an ideal place for a quiet retreat and still being able to observe what is going on in the house.

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