The Buster Tiny House Brings Comfort to the Woodland: The Perfect, Stress-Free Retreat

The Buster is a tiny home located in Matamata, Waikato, in New Zealand, built as a retreat for a couple, with or without children. By design, it can serve as a permanent residence for one adult or as a temporary retreat for a couple or small family. It’s compact but cozy, basic but with off-grid capabilities; whatever it lacks in comfort, it makes up for in styling.

The tiny house movement started out in the early 2000s but has been picking up considerable speed over the past few years. The 2020 international health crisis and the travel restrictions it brought about helped to push into the mainstream, which has, in turn, led to a more varied offer. These days, depending on your budget and what you want to do with a tiny, you can find anything from small, non-movable cabins to XXL towable tinies, DIY kits to turkeys, full custom builds, or standard models.

The Buster is the second build from a New Zealand couple trying out their hand at this profitable business. Their first one was the $72,000 Hideaway, completed in 2021: a beautiful, self-sufficient wood tiny they built for themselves and their two children, and which ended up going viral. The Buster is the follow-up project, this time designed as a woodland retreat for visitors.

Designed and built by Rick Hill, with an interior by Nikki Adcock, The Buster is located on a patch of isolated land in the middle of the native bush and farmland. It sits on a traditional trailer, to which the builders have added a wooden deck to create the impression of more space. Auckland is a two-hour-drive away, so civilization isn’t that far off, though it’s made to feel that way.

Whichever way you look out through The Buster’s windows, you see nothing but nature. The tiny has two bedrooms and one full bath and is furnished in minimalist Scandinavian style, offering just 15 square meters (161.5 square feet) of living surface. This compact footprint includes the tiny loft area that is reserved for sleeping one or two children or one adult.

On one end is the master bedroom, which is basically an elevated mattress with integrated storage, like in the Hideaway tiny. There’s a small kitchen with a two-burner stove, a sink, and a tiny dining nook opposite. This area also doubles as living, with the Roaring Meg wood burner serving as the centerpiece and the only source of warmth on winter days.

The bathroom is also very small, with a Bambaloo composting toilet, a full shower, and the smallest sink possible. Water for The Buster comes from the nearby spring, while all electricity is from the GridFree solar panels on the roof. Adcock tells Dwell that they provide enough energy to run the small fridge, the lights, and to charge a mobile phone, even in the winter months. This might not seem like much for a city dweller accustomed to everything from an electric oven to a variety of entertainment devices, but that was the goal from the get-go: to design a tiny / cabin that would have minimal impact on the environment and use a minimal amount of resources.

“Buster was built to nestle below the kaimai ranges, and provide a simplistic yet comfortable place for those of us requiring some much needed time-out from the city stressors,” Adcock says. A return to nature, if you will.

The Buster has an exterior of black corrugate, instead of the usual timber cladding, on considerations of ease of maintenance and durability. The interior is all plywood, which, according to Adcock, adds a certain sense of warmth while paying tribute to the traditional kiwi trampers huts.

The Buster is a one-off and doesn’t have a price listed. For a tiny house enthusiast with some skill, and time and money to spare, maybe it could serve as inspiration for a future project.