This Tiny House Is All About Clean, Elegant and XL Living on the Road

Tiny houses have been around for a very long time, but their attempts to go mainstream go back to two decades ago when they emerged as an option for affordable and eco-friendly housing. Like the name clearly says, a tiny house is a miniature home built on top of a trailer, which allows it to have a compact footprint that is good for the environment, good for the wallet, and good for the soul.

You've already heard this several times already if you're reading this. Tiny houses are considered the closest thing to an all-in-one solution to a large number of modern problems we're all struggling with in one form or another. They're more affordable than traditional housing, they're mobile, so they allow relocating at will (*with some caveats regarding legality of tiny homes and size), and they help with living more sustainably and intentionally.

Any other mobile home would check most of these boxes, too, but the "get" of tiny houses is that they come closest to an actual home, both in terms of layout and features. The only condition to reaping all these benefits is that you be willing to downsize, so essentially, scale down your entire life to the amount of stuff you could fit inside such a small footprint. And it's a teeny-tiny footprint, to be sure.

Unless, of course, you opt for an extra-large home.

That's what Australian builder Designer ECO Tiny Homes (DETH) hopes you're planning. The builder offers an impressive range of models of various sizes, with limited customization and layouts that will suit all budgets and needs.

The XL Series is the newest to the lineup, and it lives up to the name: it's comprised of tiny houses for those who might consider downsizing but won't because of the spatial limitations inherent to the lifestyle.

The latest in the XL Series is the 9600NRL model. The name might not be the most appealing or memorable (it's neither of these things), but it holds the key to unlocking the first main feature of the home: 9.6 meters (31.5 feet) in total length. The unit sits on a triple-axle custom-made trailer and is 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) wide and under 4.3 meters (14 feet) high, so still road-legal with or without special permits, depending on region.

The 9600NLR also stands out for a rather unusual exterior design, with contrasting paneling and an asymmetric silhouette and a surprising amount of glazing. As soon as you step inside, you see that this is more than just a choice to create a good first impression with distinctive styling: it's the thing that helps builders provide a perfectly comfortable and surprisingly spacious family home, all on the ground level.

Unlike with most tiny houses, the 9600NLR, despite the XL moniker, opts against lofts, whether for storage or sleeping. Instead, the layout is linear and offers a two-person sleeping capacity, with the possibility of sleeping two guests on the living room couch on an occasional basis.

To live up to the XL name, the unit is basked in natural light from all sides and features a spacious, residential-size bathroom, a full kitchen with two opposite blocks, one of which integrates a breakfast bar, and a proper bedroom where you can stand upright when dressing or making the bed. These might seem trivial, but not to downsizers, as most builders will compromise these spaces to offer more room in other areas.

This unit lives big in every sense of the word, assuming you consider it for two-person occupancy. It features a ground-floor bedroom with a queen-size bed surrounded by picture windows on three sides, a lounge with a couch facing the large sliding glass door, a kitchen with every possible appliance, and a proper bathroom at the end of the trailer.

The 9600NLR doesn't pack the kind of surprises we've seen in other extra large tiny home models, such as secret storage spaces or the full gamut of creature comforts or super-fancy finishes that turn it into a luxury product, but it does show that spatial limitations can be made less obvious. All you need is a large enough trailer, plenty of glazing, and a bigger budget.

This is where you can reasonably make the argument – again – that tiny houses are priced prohibitively, if not shamelessly so. The XL Series 9600NLR might be the perfect mobile family home, but it comes with a starting price of AUD134,900, or US$88,000 at the current exchange rate. That's cheaper than other XL variants we've seen, but it doesn't include customization, furniture, or any off-grid capabilities.