Inside A Tiny House That Looks Like A Spaceship | Unique Spaces | Architectural Digest

Those are QR codes for the two websites for the spaceship project. So when I'm not here and people come by and go, what the hell is that? Then they can just walk up with their phone and get the answer. Welcome to the Lunar Lander dwelling house. We're in Beverly, Washington on the Columbia River in the Columbia Basin. It's a desert part of Washington state. My Lunar Lander is a replica of the Apollo Lunar Lander that went to the moon in the late 60s, early 70s. One of the connections was the astronauts trained some 50 miles downstream. I decided to build this Lunar Lander because I've been building things pretty much all my life. When I was 21 or 22, I built a dome. When I was in college, I built my first sailboat. When tiny homes started becoming a thing, I noticed that they had several problems. They were heavy. They were structurally weak. I'm a catamaran designer, and I thought these same technologies could apply to make a better tiny house. The first thing I did was to do a 3D model that I could pull off patterns. And from those patterns, I cut pieces out, vacuum bagged them together, brought them over here, and then used epoxy to glue them all together. I'm Kurt Hughes, and this is my proof of concept prototype of a tiny house built like a catamaran. When people first come in here, they see Captain Nemo's window. Just like 20,000 leagues under the sea, the idea was to have it an open environment. It's nice to be able to come in, look out the window, watch the river, and right below it is the table from my first sailboat that got repurposed here. The lights are controlled by buttons like on this one here. Then they can sit down in the comfortable epoxy foam seats. These holes in the chairs save weight. It's kind of an aerospace thing, and that's sort of a philosophical statement of the whole building. You'll notice there's a lot of NASA here. NASA's a good model for efficient spacecraft. Anti-gravity pads overhead in case the gravity disappears. Off to the left there is the weather center, so we can see what's actually happening outside there. And then here might be the only set of stamped, engineered plans of a lunar lander house that there is. Here's one sheet, for example, with the elevations. Those are pulled off of the 3D model. This is what I would do to a boat design. Okay, the next thing would be the sink, which is actually like a telescope mirror. It picks up the lights and the sunlight here and focuses it to it. Certain place right there, which is something I never expected, and I'm surprised. These are plumbing fixtures that I've converted to light controls. Here's the bathroom. It's a Japanese Toto wall hung toilet that I wanted to see the mechanisms for. So I bolted it right to the wall, and it ends up with a tank that's only three inches deep, which on a tiny house saves a lot of space. Over there is the toilet paper holder. On the floor is glow-in-the-dark powder, so that at night the entire floor is glowing like the Milky Way, so you can see where you're going. And the shower has different light colors for the temperature of the water. So when the water is cold, it's blue. As it warms up, it's green. And when you get to 45 degrees Celsius, it's red. There's my compact boat bathroom on a house. Okay, next we look at the front door. The door opens with fingertip biometrics. And then it's interesting, look how thick it is. It insulates R15. Most doors are R2 or R3, so it's got a huge amount more insulation. But then that required a recessed door handle, so that added another week of construction time right there. But it had to be just right. Okay, this is the kitchen, or galley as we call it, on a boat. And one of the interesting things is my carbon fiber countertop. Range hood makes it legal with the code. There's the sink, microwave, refrigerator, drawers for storage. There's a 3D model of the lunar lander that my daughter created for me, and it's the same 3D model that I used to build the plans. Probably the most important thing that the boat design does to help the kitchen is the moisture control. This is all epoxy, and so you don't need a backsplash, because the epoxy does it anyway. Up overhead is a dome that lets the light in, and that way at night I can sit here and look at the stars when the lights are off. It's all steel with plexiglass panels. It was a finite element study to have more than enough strength for any snow load. The lighting going around the upper part of the ceiling there, so I want to be able to change the colors. But also they're all wrapped with three-quarter ounce spinnaker cloth from the sailboat, and so it has a Japanese lantern feel. Now the original lunar lander didn't have a deck, but I wanted to have a way to be able to see this beautiful scenery. So you sit out here in the evening, a couple chairs, have a drink, look at the river. It's great. So originally this was going to be a lounging pit, but the building department declared it had to have seven foot headroom, so it got a lot deeper, and then that became the bedroom. Okay, let's go down and have a look at the downstairs. So we're downstairs now. This is the bed. This is the ship's ladder that we just came down on. The floor is all Ethafoam, like a wrestling mat, so that you can fall comfortably if you fall. Six of the closets here, and then there's some lights here. So right down there is a planetarium, and it projects up on the ceiling. I feel like I'm traveling through space when I have the planetarium on and I'm looking at it. I wanted to use boat windows downstairs. The problem was the building department wouldn't allow it, unless I took out the plastic standard boat windows and replaced them with double pane argon filled e-coating windows. And now we'll go take a look at the outside. Here we're on the outside of the Lunar Lander dwelling. It's got some unusual features. It's not on the ground, it's off the ground. There's concrete pads at the end of each of the steel legs. A neighbor across the street happened to have a plasma cutter, and he cut out my railings. How cool is that? And he cut out the stair stringers. These structural legs are actually an improvement over the original Lunar Lander. They had four legs, which is an unstable configuration. This has three, which is much more stable. You'll notice there's hold-down cables, like we do rigging on a sailboat. And that's what's important to keep a very light structure weighing about just over a ton, keep it in one place. There's glow pebbles on the walkway, so you can see where you're walking at night. And then there's solar-powered footlights to light up the steps all night long. So these are storage bins for outside storage and inside storage on the inside. There's never enough storage in a tiny house, so I wanted to make sure we had a lot of it. This has become my favorite place in the world. It's fun, it's interesting, and it keeps me thinking. It's just a beautiful place to get away to.