This Cleverly-Designed Tiny Home Has a Mini-Garage, Plenty of Storage and Superb Views

In recent years, tiny living and alternative mobile housing solutions have emerged as the antidote to the housing crisis, offering permanent homes that, in turn, offer that much-needed and often-lacking sense of security. Because it is self-contained and highly mobile, a tiny house could be that sanctuary, if you’re willing to downsize your previous lifestyle and start living intentionally.

That’s a big “if,” so yes, tiny living is not for everyone. But for those who do echo the sentiment, this tiny house will be a dream come true before their very eyes: a beautiful, dual-loft tiny parked in an isolated corner of the rainforest in Auckland, New Zealand, where a future tiny house community will soon emerge. The owner is Christine, a retired professional and empty-nester, and she’s been living in it for the past three years.

Christine allowed Bryce Langston of the popular Living Big in a Tiny House channel to film the house for a tour, offering certain details of the build. She doesn’t mention the builder or the model her house was based on (it’s clearly custom, that much is clear), but the layout and certain distinctive feature mark it as a potential Shaye’s Tiny Homes custom.

The company was founded by springboard diver Shaye Boddington in 2019, emerging as one of the most in-demand tiny builders in the country in the years since. It’s also the only one to use the “trick” of sinking the floor in the bedroom loft into the cabinets in the kitchen to create a walkway with standing height, a very impressive gimmick that gives these tinies the leg up the competition. As you must know, most tiny houses don’t offer standing height in the loft, which makes everyday tasks like dressing up or even making the bed quite challenging. By creating this walkway around the bed, they’re not an issue anymore.

Christine’s tiny also shares the exterior design with any one of the Shaye’s models. It’s clad in cedar and metal siding, and comes with an attached deck made up of 1-meter (3.2-foot) sections bolted together. The advantage to that is, when the time comes for Christine to move it, either to her own piece of land or another location, the deck is easy to take apart for relocation.

The tiny is almost 9 meters long by 2.7 meters wide (29.5 x 8.8 feet), with a bump-out at the rear that currently serves as a mini-garage. There’s no mini-car in there, because it’s a joke: Christine uses it as a gardening tool shed and storage, so it’s more like the shelving area inside a garage where you keep this kind of stuff. In the future, the bump-out will hold the batteries and inverter, because the plan is to take the tiny off-grid.

The interior is very beautiful but functional, thanks to a clever design and plenty of retro touches – there’s even a piano inside, which must be a first for a tiny house. The ground floor holds the living room, with the kitchen and the bathroom at either end, framed by storage-integrating staircases that lead up to the lofts. Christine chose not to connect those with a walkway, to keep the living room feeling like an atrium with high ceilings and plenty of natural light coming in through expansive glazing. Instead, the dual staircase option offers her extra amount of storage: one staircase doubles as pantry and cabinetry for the kitchen, while the other holds books, clothes and miscellaneous items.

The bathroom is tucked under one of the sets of stairs, under the loft that does triple duty as guest room, entertainment room and meditation room. It has a composting toilet, shower and sink with vanity, but also a laundry station with a washing machine and shelving. The kitchen is compact but fitted with full-size appliances: a four-burner gas stove, an oven, fridge and freezer, a large farm sink, and even a fold-out dining table for four people.

Over the kitchen is the master bedroom, which, again, features ample storage in the form of dual wardrobes. Besides a surprising amount of storage, this house is a standout for the surprising amount of glazing, opening it up on all sides to the incredible landscape around the parking spot. Where there isn’t a window there’s a mirror, with Christine and the builder integrating them wherever possible, to reflect the light coming in through the windows and create the impression of a much larger space.

The tiny is on the grid, but Christine plans to make it self-sufficient at one point. The Wagener Sparky wood-burning stove and the Bambooloo composting toilet represent half a step in that direction, and she will add solar and water tanks. While she doesn’t disclose the builder, she does say that she started out with an initial budget of NZ$145,000 (US$90,900), but the final cost of the home, including the deck and all the appliances, was slightly higher, at NZ$160,000 (US$100,300). It’s not a bad trade-off for her own home, which also happens to be a gorgeous, zen-like retreat.