Hasta La Ideas

If design is about navigating limitations to deliver good experiences, then tiny houses are fascinating little crucibles of design. The modern house—in America, anyway—often offers seemingly arbitrary design features, or decorative ones that make little functional sense. In contrast, everything in a tiny house speaks of firm decision-making by the designer.

French industrial designer Laëtitia Dupé designed and built her own tiny house in 2013. Smitten with the experience, she teamed up with fellow tiny house builder Vincent Bouhours to start Baluchon, a tiny house design/build company. (Dupé is a confirmed ID’er; I was not able to learn Bouhours’ credentials, but he apparently has a background in eco-construction and possesses technical design skills.)

Dupé and her tiny house in 2014

Baluchon recently completed this turnkey Bonzai Tiny House, purpose-built for a client in the UK. At just 4.5m in length (14’9″), it’s diminutive and was designed to actually be towed; the client travels England for work and lives in the tiny house year-round.

The location Dupé chose for the entryway door demonstrates very outside-of-the-box thinking. In something as a tiny house, every square inch counts; walls are precious spaces to either place needed storage or windows to admit light. Where to place the structure’s lone exterior door is a problem and a sacrifice–no matter where it goes, it takes up a relatively large amount of valuable wall space that could either be storage or a window.

So Dupé cleverly placed the entry door in the bathroom.

This makes sense on at least two levels. The client is a Japanophile who wanted a Japanese-style home. Japanese homes feature a genkan, a typically tiled entryway where residents doff their shoes, in order to keep the rest of the floors clean. With the front door leading almost directly into the shower, the Bonzai’s genkan is easy to rinse off.

Secondly, the bathroom is the room where you need the least amount of storage; blankets, large pots and clothes are never stored in one. So that chunk of wall can be sacrificed for the door.

Moving through the bathroom, you enter the kitchen. The entire right wall is dedicated to storage; the left side features the sink and cooktop, a window, more storage, and a beefy pull-out that extends the prep space.

A shoji-screen pocket door leads into the space’s final room.

Floored with tatami mats, it features a flip-down table on the far wall for dining. A window on the right floods the room with light.

This room is a step down from the kitchen. The vertical discrepancy leaves space for four large, deep drawers that extend beneath the kitchen floor.

To the side of the pocket door is an open storage compartment where the futon mattress is stored. (Note that this is an actual Japanese futon, which is thin enough to actually be rolled or folded up.) Sleeping is done on the floor.

There’s a pull-down projection screen and soundbar above the door, for movie nights.

The one thing I’d criticize in this house is the woodburning stove within the end room. (I’m not sure why I think this, but if I had to guess, the client insisted on it.) First off, there’s no place to store firewood. Secondly, carrying it inside through the bathroom and kitchen is bound to leave a trail of detritus on the floor in both rooms, not to mention on the tatami. Thirdly, cleaning the stove out is bound to scatter ash on the tatami, which would likely give any Japanese person a heart attack.

The decision was made to put the entryway door on the tow-side of the structure, rather than on the trailing end, “to facilitate comings and goings with the tow vehicle.” I take this to mean the owner prioritized speed-of-entry when going from vehicle to house, rather than having the unobstructed view/path that you’d have placing it on the other end.

Lastly, there is a ladder leading to the tiny roof deck, where you can take in some sun.

Well, English sun, anyway.

You can see more of Dupé’s Baluchon designs here.