＊One of a Kind＊ Tiny House Built with Special Interior Details & Design – FULL TOUR

The interesting thing about building tiny homes is it's a very small space, so it's a challenge to design for. There's a lot of things that you have to take into account. This tiny house is about 235 square feet with the main floor and the loft included, so it's a small space. But when you're in it, it's very comfortable. I made almost everything in this home with my own hands, you know, including the windows, the door, several of the lights, and the cabinetry, etc, etc. And I worked hard to bring in a lot of high quality local wood and to create unique touches that are custom made. It was extremely labor intensive, but I like the way that all the elements work together to create a very comfortable space. My name is Matt Fattori and this is the tiny house that I built. The first build for my company Nutshell Design and Build Co. So this tiny house is located on Vancouver Island. It's a beautiful place to live and there's a lot of interest in alternative living and tiny houses around here. So the dimensions of this tiny house are very typical for a tiny house. It's a 26 foot trailer. It's eight and a half feet wide and 13 and a half feet high. So this siding is made out of two different types of cedar, yellow cedar and red cedar. It's been milled from rough lumber down into shiplap, so they're all overlapping boards. I applied it in the chevron pattern which took quite a bit of work but I think it gives it a really unique look and I like it. This has got an oil stain from Timber Pro and I've sort of got a few different colors and mixed them to get various shades here. This Siding is sitting on top of a rain screen gap, so that will keep the siding in good shape for a lot longer. And behind that, there is a continuous layer of rigid foam board as exterior insulation before you get to the house wrap and the sheathing. I've got a 50 amp hook up here. Sort of a typical RV thing and I think ideally you would have a deck out front here to increase the square footage. And then along the top I have this series of seven clerestory windows that just provide nice high lighting for the interior of the building. You know the ceiling is 11 something feet high at the high end so this is my lighting scheme up top. this is a 26 foot double axle trailer that was purpose designed and custom made for tiny houses so i sourced it very locally. they're not cheap but it's a very sturdy trailer. this house is incredibly stable. it does have fairly open framing 22 inches on center but it's got the cross bracing of yellow cedar timbers and in addition to that it's got Three and a half inches of closed cell spray foam that fills up the cavities and increases the rigidity kind of to a ridiculous amount. So we've moved this and it was very very solid. I felt comfortable having it on the road. At the end of the home here I decided to add an additional bump out utility shed just to keep that stuff from taking up interior space. It's got two sides to it and the one side has the 100 amp power panel. And some utility shelving and on the other side here we have the water intake at the bottom of the shed here and it comes up into the plumbing. The plumbing is fed through this two-stage filtration system and then the hot water goes through this propane on demand unit. So the back side I wanted to give this a bit more of an extension of the blue color that I have on the roof. So this is again this is shiplap it's actually hemlock back here instead of cedar. the roof is a Westman steel roof in Heron Blue. so the way the roof is built there's two by six rafters, there's spray foam in that, there's decking on top of that, and then there's a roof underlayment on top of that, and then there's the Westman steel panels on top of that with the drip edge etc. and then there's two skylights up there. the casement windows have awnings on them. I installed them with folding brackets so you can actually fold it down. So this is my tiny house. We're standing in the kitchen right now. So it's got this continuous surface that runs all the way along here. The sink is undermount and the stove top is set flush into the counter. So very easy to wipe food into this sink and off the counter. Really easy to keep clean. Something that I really appreciate in the kitchen. There's quite a bit of space for prepping food and whatnot. It's got a bit of open shelving and I prefer open shelving because it allows the feel of the space to remain more open. Under the sink I have a garbage and recycling caddy here and then just you know a bit more space for other stuff. And then I've got a series of soft closed drawers here. The bottom has a bit of extra depth for bigger items. Couple more drawers over here and cubby spaces for items like cutting boards etc. And then I've got this neat little spice caddy I built here or whatever else you might want to throw in this. We've got our stove exhaust here and a refrigerator. It's like a cute little 11 cubic foot refrigerator and it's got a bottom freezer which is something that I prefer. Over here i made this table which is 50s diner inspired and uh you know by the big picture window it's kind of got a a cafe seating type of feel and just for the heck of it decided to make it foldable so that you have space to bring big items into if you want to or if you want to have a dance party in the middle of the kitchen you can do that so there are a few sort of japanese aesthetic touches in here and one of them is this japanese lantern that i built which was a complicated little thing that i did right at the end of the build. yeah in addition to that there's this shoji screen that sits above the bathroom wall and lets a little bit of light through. The aspects of the Japanese aesthetic that I really like is the emphasis of natural materials and the minimalist aesthetic. This is the big picture window that you sit at to gaze out on the world and perhaps eat your breakfast lunch or dinner at. They're all double glazed units and the most difficult part was learning how to build windows to sit the glass units into. So on a lot of tiny house trailers you have this wheel well that you need a strategy for, and my strategy has just been to cover it up in an aesthetically pleasing way as possible. I suppose it also forms a footrest if you're sitting at a larger stool, our taller stool at the table here. So under the stairs here I have a large-ish pantry cupboard, soft clothes, got a little bit of seating here in case you wanted to put some shoes on inside and i've got a little drawer under here this was my one concession to a used appliance here it's um something that's i believe common in rvs it's a a washer dryer combo unit and they're a bit expensive new i found a good used version on the market so that's what i ended up with here and moving into the bathroom I sourced this interesting brass wall faucet from Morocco and I put it on this wooden pedestal which is some local air-dried maple that I found. It's got a composting toilet here, so it's a urine diverting toilet. You know, every once in a while you empty it out and you're good to go. Here's a retained fronted cabinet unit that I made, so got a lot of storage space for for whatever bathroom items here. It's got a very quiet fan, got a Panasonic whisper green exhaust fan. So over here we have this wet room style shower and I've got a living wall above it. I was just trying to create sort of like a more appealing bathroom experience. So I like the feel of this bathroom. It is a small space, but it's got increased spaciousness just from having a high ceiling, which I kind of like. And it's got all the functionality I think that you need. The bathroom floor has a natural stone floor with a custom slope to it that slopes towards the shower drain at the back. And there's an in-floor heating unit in it. So tiny houses are notorious for having kind of cold floors with their exposure to the elements in the winter. So in-floor heating was a sort of minimalist or elegant design option that I thought would work well in here. Here's the thermostat for that. It's a separate unit from the the main living area which has a different in-floor heating system under the hardwood flooring and a thermostat just inside the front door here. So the flooring in here is alderwood and it's got this nice hard wax finish on it and underneath it is an in-floor heating system. It's a thermosoft product which is just a very thin wire in a fabric mat and it's the only product that I'm aware of on the market that can be applied under hardwood flooring. So the whole space is heated quite efficiently with electrical In-floor heating. When you move down here I made a curtain here so that you have the option of having this space as a lounging spot and you can you can close off the kitchen and the other parts of the house that are more utilitarian. This is the living room here. It's got high lighting from three of the clerestory windows that run along the top of the house. It's got a large standing open shelf system. It's got this fold-out sofa here, a side table, this very versatile counterweighted light that can be dimmed and positioned anywhere that you would like to have light. It's also got a small built-in desk unit here with a dimmable light. There's an outlet here, an outlet over here. The wall paneling is all birch plywood that I shiplapped, and you can take the wall panels off and access the interior of the wall if needs be. Maybe 10 or so years ago I first really got into woodworking because I wanted to be able to build things like this. This is a large format camera. They're a bit prohibitively expensive so I wanted to build my own instead of buying them. Eventually I got really into designing them myself. This is another one that's designed as a handheld camera. They sort of gave me an introduction to more careful woodworking. Eventually that led to me having a bit more confidence to build a home like this. I wanted to break up the wall surfaces a bit. I didn't want the wood paneling to cover the entire interior of the house, so in the living room to give it a bit of a different feel I bought this. Very interesting paper weave wallpaper. I believe this is made in Japan and sold by a company in the States. I really love the feel that it gives to the room here. It gives a nice natural texture that complements and contrasts with the fur trim. So there's two operable casement windows in this house in addition to the opening loft skylight. And the benefit of a casement window is that it opens horizontally and it scoops air really efficiently so it's maybe the best way to get a cross breeze traveling naturally across your living space. so part of the design of this house was to have it cooled passively because it is insulated very well with strategic shading of shading of windows and with venting, it's a pretty sound strategy and it works pretty well. I've got this custom sofa that folds out to provide extra sleeping for guests. It's just a tri-fold design and then you can install a topper on there or you can just throw your bedding on top of there. There's a couple cubbies, a larger one at this end of the sofa and a smaller one under the end table at the far end of the sofa. So potentially you could store extra bedding in there and that's just another design aspect that I wanted to add to make this space a little bit more versatile. This sofa is foam upholstered in Italian wool. It's quite comfortable. Wool is great because it's cozy in the winter and cool in the summer so it's a versatile fabric for upholstering. So heading up to the loft here I have this fur ladder stairway. There wasn't room enough. to give a proper run for a traditional stairway so this is what i ended up with but it's got a comfortable slope to it and i find it really easy to walk up and down and up here we've got this yellow cedar slat wall i guess i might as well show you this is whoops openable so this allows you to bring a large bed in or out of here if you care to The loft is I think about six and a half feet by the width of the house interior which is about seven and a half feet so it's really a cozy sleeping loft up here. You can see it's got some shelving at the far side, got this nice stained glass window that you prop open when you want ventilation through that side of the house. This goes down into the kitchen and it's it's almost directly above the the kitchen casement window so The breeze gets kicked around, hot air rises up here, can flow through here and also through the slat wall. And then we have this big central opening skylight. So this can technically be your point of egress if you're ever in a situation of emergency and wanted to exit through the roof. And it's integral to the venting-cooling scheme of the house, so the hot air rises up from either end and ends up venting through the roof here, and it works quite well. And I've also just got this very simple shading system for the skylight, because obviously at times you get a lot of solar gain through here and you don't necessarily want that. And then I've also got one of the seven clerestory windows that runs along the top of the building. I've got an end table here with a plug and an integral cubby underneath. I've got this interesting Turkish goatskin drum that provides the light. Aesthetically to me that looks like a moon when it's lit up. I could spend a lot of time tucked away up here. I quite like it. This house is currently for sale and I started a company called Nutshell Design and Build Company to create custom tiny houses. I'm interested in creating different recipes, I would say, for building tiny homes. You're limited to this size, but there's a lot that you can do in it. For example, I would like to build a tiny home that's focused on using recycled materials. And another idea that I would like to pursue is off-grid homes, so something with solar capabilities. And so, yeah, there's a lot of things that I would like to try out. Hopefully the company's going in that direction. Subscribe to Exploring Alternatives and check out our playlists for more tiny house tours like this. You can also follow Matt and his tiny house builds on his website at Nutshell Design and Build Co. Thanks for watching.