This Artsy "Camper" Is a Stark Exercise in Minimalism, With Adaptable Configurations

This is La Casa Nueva, a tiny house that sits at the intersection of mobile houses and art, and that looks like a dare on how small you can build and still call the result a mobile house.

La Casa Nueva was designed and built by architect slash designer slash artist Juan Alberto Andrade, whose name you might be familiar with for his work on the Dodo Van we discussed a while back. Andrade built La Casa Nueva as a mobile home for himself and his wife, and they lived in it, traveling through Ecuador.

Andrade calls this towable a "camper," but don't take that in the most literal sense. Realistically, it's a tiny house condensed to the very essence of tiny living, to the point where you might even mistake it for a shed on wheels. A livable shed, but a shed nonetheless.

You'd be mistaken if you did, though. Though this mobile home is minimalist to a fault, it's packed with the basic features to make life comfortable for the two residents, from a toilet to a kitchen, a bedroom, and even a small home office. Perhaps even tiny house dwellers would scoff at the idea of trying to live in something as small as this, but La Casa Nueva is built with great attention to detail and, to an extent, beauty.

These past few years, we've heard and talked a lot about tiny living, downsizing, and living the life of a digital nomad. The housing situation was already terrible before the 2020 international health crisis and the current financial one, and that explains the boom in popularity of alternative housing solutions. The fact that people – digital nomads, in particular – found out that they could make money off this peculiar lifestyle only helped propel it even faster into the spotlight.

Not that we're complaining. Even if you're not into downsizing or the idea of living on the road, there's plenty of appeal in seeing what other options exist. Such stark minimalism as that proposed by La Casa Nueva is one of them, though you don't come across it that frequently.

Andrade's "camper" sits on a single-axle metal trailer that's 3 meters long by 2 meters wide (10 feet by 6.5 feet). For comparison, many of today's smaller tinies will still be just under the lower limit, so at least 7 meters long and 2.4 meters wide.

Completed in 2021, La Casa Nueva offers a home-like space within just 6 square meters by creating five imaginary sections and assigning them the functionality of various rooms in a house. You have a bedroom module at the rear, with integrated storage, a workspace that doubles as a dining room, and a service area at the front, with a small kitchen and a bathroom. Notably, the kitchen features a small sink and portable cooker, while the bathroom has a composting toilet and a sink on top.

Some of these features are hard to come by, even on larger towables or mobile homes. Van conversions, for example, will usually lack a bathroom, while some tiny homes don't have a sink in the bathroom.

It helps that Andrade picked sleek, all-wood finishes to keep the space from feeling downright claustrophobic. The outer shell is made from yellowheart lumber, while the furniture is made of plywood boards with minimalist hardware, and teak boards make up the structural frame.

It also helps that La Casa Nueva can open up almost completely to the exterior, thanks to what Andrade describes as an adaptable configuration. Instead of putting windows on the "camper," the designer chose to put wooden panels on hinges, and they allow the house to adapt to the environment, either closing off completely or blooming open to let the outside in.

Opting out of using windows also helped with the overall weight of the towable.

Even with the recent push for minimalism, La Casa Nueva is clearly not for everyone, or, at the very least, it's probably not a tempting alternative for someone making the transition from a brick-and-mortar home to a mobile one. But it was the perfect choice for Andrade and his wife, who wanted a towable that was highly mobile and small and that would allow him to remain in one location for a few days.

For two young people living in Ecuador, looking to travel as much as possible and be out in nature, it was proof that less truly is more, at times.

To everyone else, it's an example of just how far you can take downsizing and still have the basics in terms of comfort and homeliness. You be the judge whether it's a good or a bad example.