Inside A Silo Transformed Into A Tiny Urban Home | Unique Spaces | Architectural Digest

I became very interested in the spaces that we all find ourselves in the majority of the time. We live in homes, and these homes, they can just be a box that you walk inside of and crash out on a bed, but they can also be things that really feed your soul in a way, and architecture has the ability to do that. What we're looking at is a 1955 grain silo. These were dappled across the agricultural landscape of America and used by farmers to dry grain or corn. We're in downtown Phoenix, and specifically we're in Garfield Historic District. It's a little unexpected because we're surrounded by mesquite trees, we're in this garden setting, and yet we are less than a half mile from the tallest building in the city. The original inspiration for the silo house, a little bit of serendipity. I was looking actually for a garden shed, and I came across somebody selling a kit of parts that was for a grain silo. Ended up purchasing it, built it, and all the while, as this thing started to take shape, I began to think about, could I craft a home for people to live in inside of this thing? This project was dear to my heart also because it was for me. I lived here personally for 18 months, and this was something that was a joy to live in. I'm Christoph Kaiser, this is the silo house. This is the interior of the silo home. So we're standing right now in the kitchen slash dining area. When designing a kitchen for such a small space, there are appliances, there's utensils, there's so many things that you have to work into the space, and the big challenge here was eliminating or minimizing visual clutter, and so there's a lot of layers here, almost like the skin of an onion. So right here we're looking at a panel that can accommodate utensil storage, cutting board storage, there's a television. Behind this panel is a full-size refrigerator, and then moving further right here, this is a gas range that we had custom water jet cut out of a solid piece of half-inch plate steel. When designing not just the kitchen, but all of these spaces down here, we ended up doing a digital model that was very precise, because when you're dealing with a space this tight, the door swing, is it intersecting with another door swing? Doing cabinets that pull out on a radius is a very tricky thing to work out to make sure that you don't have intersecting rails. There are other silo houses out there in the world, and I feel like many of them will insert flat walls and straight cabinets, and that's something that I really didn't want to do. I wanted everything about the interior to be of one breath with the exterior of the silo, and so there's no straight lines. This is one of my favorite spots in the silo house. This is a custom sofa that we fabricated to match the outside radius of the silo. Sitting here, you're looking up 26 feet into the cone, and beyond that, the oculus, and it's just a great spot with a lot of verticality, and at night you can actually sit here and stargaze, which is pretty beautiful. So here we're going to check out the bathroom. The bathroom, much like aspects of the kitchen, is hidden away. It's something that you don't know is there unless you need it. So the plan of the bathroom in the silo house is a somewhat conventional 3 foot by 9 foot plan. The difference is that we've taken that rectangle and we've arced it, and within that sort of arced rectangle we have our shower, and then we have the toilet with the vanity directly on axis. This was a custom piece where we created what we call a shadow box, and emerging from that shadow box we have our faucet, we have a sink, and then over here we have the same setup. The toilet is emerging also from a shadow box that above it has something similar to a medicine cabinet, but in this case it's additional toilet paper and towels and that kind of thing. So next we're going to take a walk up these stairs and check out the second floor. So this is the sleeping mezzanine of the silo house, and similar to the downstairs, we have millwork that wraps the south side of the space, and many of these walnut panels are fixed. This one actually has our mechanical chase inside of it, and a lot of these other panels are custom doors that have magnetic latches on them. The small doors, strangely, are much harder to build than the big ones. When you're moving into a place like this, you have to par down, and the fact that you have three pairs of pants or three pairs of shoes, there's something very liberating in not having so many options. So there are so many cool things that are packed into the southern wall of the silo house. Behind this panel here there's actually the subwoofer for the sound system, there's satellite speakers that live in the air registers, and then the top of this cabinet piece, I want it to be a light trough that just illuminates the cone of the silo. One of my favorite aspects of this upstairs is this window. This is a slot window that is also the front door on the first level. So from this window here we can see ASU downtown, U of A downtown, we can see the tallest building in Phoenix. This view to the skyline from a very intimate bedroom setting is something that I think is one of the more special aspects of the silo. Second to that is downstairs where we're going to head next. There's a large radius door that really allows the interior of the silo to bleed into the exterior. Let's go check that out. So this is the outdoor patio of the silo house. Similar to the inside, there's different sections or realms. We have outdoor living, we have outdoor dining. This is the garden. So this is for like if you're cooking dinner, you can grab some rosemary, some basil, some cilantro. This is thyme. On the back edge, these are kumquat trees. Another aspect of this outdoor space, I didn't want the radius geometry of the silo to stop at the silo. And so you see that picked up on in these garden beds. And again, the slat wall that's directly behind that is a backdrop to the entire scene and really allowing that radius to take your eyes around the space and for it to be a continuous backdrop to whether you're in sort of this lounge area or the dining space. So right here, there's a custom water feature that we designed and had fabricated. This is about making a transformative experience. So when you hear the sound of the water feature, it drowns out the sounds of the city beyond and it really transports you and puts you in a new environment. A little bit further behind me is an outdoor shower. There is some redundancy in the sort of program that's offered in the interior and the exterior, and that was intentional. I wanted very much for the outdoors to offer a lot of what's offered on the inside. Being able to shower underneath the shade of a mesquite tree while being in a botanical garden is a lot of what this particular experience in this particular context offers. Thank you for letting me give you a tour of the Silo House. As you can see, a lot goes into designing a round. I've lived in a few different tiny homes now, and with each one of those, there's a simplicity of life that gives back to you in a way that's sort of unexpected. I've lived here for 18 months, and as of recently, the Silo House is available on Airbnb. If you're in the area and you'd like to experience the Silo House for yourself, come check us out.