Tiny

Three great examples of tiny homes.

A while back I saw the video about Gary Chang's apartment in Hong Kong, curiosity piqued by the YouTube title "A Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Rooms". Seduced by the idea I watched the entire video (along with Chang's jolting Hong Kong English) and was mesmerised by the permutations that the shifting modules can create, apparently, 24 different spaces.

A more recent example is the New York apartment of Treehugger's founder. With an eco-efficiency mindset, the design of his home was crowd-sourced and ideas selected. The final solution makes use of some really excellent product design to supplement a much simpler sliding spaces arrangement.

It highlights the move away from 'rooms' at all, but space and how we use it. Micro-houses are already a huge thing in Japanese architecture due to tiny sites. These apartments economise space even further by thinking about the specific programmes of the space with a bit of human intervention. Rather than sprawling houses on huge pieces of land (and a lot of lawn maintenance), the inner-city lifestyle has increasing appeal and design is making it all the better.

Whether it's the constraint of a tiny site or just a compact way of life, this sort of design is never short of innovation. Even garages have been converted into stylish small homes, a touch of architecture and a boatload of thought lets just enjoy the smaller side of life. Gems surrounded by stone.

Thanks to Nico and Alice for the great examples behind this post - love it when people feed me ideas and awesome creative things! I, for one, can't wait to design such cool little environments someday when I become an architect.