That strong essences come in small bottles is probably a phrase that’s been used to death, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Tiny houses are a solid example of how this applies in real life.
The tiny house movement has been around for more than two decades, being born out of environmental concerns and the desire to scale down, and is seeing a massive boom right now, due to the ongoing health crisis. Tiny houses, with their tiny footprint and ability to offer freedom to relocate at will, seem to hold the promise of a more eco-friendly and authentic life.
Wide adoption has not and will probably not happen for tiny houses, and restrictive pricing is perhaps the main cause. But that’s not stopping designers and builders from pursuing all manners of developments and innovations in these mobile homes.
Madeiguincho is one such builder. The company got started as a family woodworking business in Portugal but has expanded into architecture and tiny homes after noticing the spike in demand. One of their latest projects, part of the T.O.W. (Tiny Houses on Wheels) series, is Ursa, a most striking tiny that is tailor-made for off-grid living.
Photo: Madeiguincho
Initially designed as a concept, the study garnered enough interest to become reality. Ursa is now located in Cascais, Portugal, and is running in an unofficial competition for most elegant minimalist design. Measuring 7 meters (23 feet) in length and 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) in width, it sits on a double-axle trailer and can be towed without additional permits.
Ursa has two frames, a steel one and a wooden one, with insulation in between, and offers accommodation in total comfort for four people in two bedrooms. As with most other tiny houses, the conventional rooms of a house are not actual rooms here, but areas.
You enter directly into the kitchen from the wooden deck, and you find the living room and a bedroom on the left. Everything is cut down to size, but you still have seating on a sofa-like bench, a wood-burning stove, office space, and plenty of room to move around without knocking over stuff. The kitchen is bare-bones, but comes with a fridge, a two-burner stove, and ample cooking space and storage.
The bathroom, by comparison, feels regal: there’s a big shower and dry toilet, and a sink with a stone basin. Again, this is not uncommon in tiny houses, where builders seem to draw the line at the bathroom when it comes to just how much of the space we have in our fixed, non-mobile homes can be sacrificed. Over the bathroom is the second bedroom, or loft, accessible through a set of stairs mounted on the wall.
Photo: Madeiguincho
Ursa doesn’t stand out for the layout or sleeping capacity, but it does impress through styling, with its clean and homey birch plywood interior, the feature window over the bedroom, and operable slatted wooden shutters over the sliding glass doors. It also stands out for being off-grid capable, to the point where it’s very similar to a passive house – an unsurprising similarity, since it was designed to replicate one.
The roof tilts to 5 degrees, to allow rainwater collection. The water is stored in two large tanks capable of holding a total of 650 liters (172 gallons) and then pumped into the fixtures: the two sinks and the shower. The toilet is an electric compost one, so there’s no need for water here. A three-stage reverse osmosis filter under the kitchen sink offers potable water, while used water can be stored for later, for stuff like watering the plants.
All in-home appliances are powered by solar power, with Ursa carrying five solar panels on the roof that can be adjusted to a degree of 30% for maximum energy production. Energy produced is converted and stored, to avoid the need of a generator.
Ursa offers a total of 17.5 square meters (188 square feet) of living surface, but it’s packed with everything you need, whether you wish to use it as a weekend cabin, vacation residence, office or even a permanent home. According to Madeiguincho, in the future, it will also integrate food production production systems, whatever that entails.
Photo: Madeiguincho
And this brings us to the always-thorny issue of pricing. Ursa doesn’t come with an exact price tag, but Madeiguincho notes that all their tinies start at €30,000 plus VAT, which would be roughly $35,000 at the current exchange rate, and which probably doesn’t include the solar array or the smart compost toilet. Even so, it’s dirt cheap compared to most tinies making headlines these days.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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