Woman Builds 186 Sq. Ft. Modern Tiny Home to Bypass Unaffordable Housing Market

Tiny House; Thousand Crow in Vancouver, Canada

A few months ago, Lloyd wrote about how many tiny homes are too cutesy and even "ugly," considering the multitude of sleeping lofts squeezed under impractical gable roofs. No wonder when we showed a couple of tiny homes inspired by Japanese design

Building yet another modern tiny home with Japanese flavours is 50-year-old Vancouverite Isabella Mori, who got her new 186 square-foot tiny home built late last year as a way to bypass rising rents and Vancouver's shockingly expensive real estate market, recently ranked second-most unaffordable in the world, after Hong Kong.

Faced with this dilemma, Mori got a tiny home builder, John McFarlane of Camera Buildings, to build her a custom-designed tiny house. Mori spent about CAD $39,000 (USD $30,995) to create a home that is well-lit, and packed with lots of transformer furniture for her and her two cats. A sense of financial security -- without having to shell out a fortune for a condo -- was her top priority, as Mori told The Province:

Basically, I was looking for some kind of housing security in Vancouver — which we all know is hard to find — and also not having a lot of money to go out and buy something. I was having to seriously think about looking at what’s going to happen to me.

It's one of the better designed tiny homes we've seen: the elongated layout, with the galley kitchen to one side, and the full wall of slatted windows to the other side, makes it feel much more spacious. The home has two levels, with the entry, closet and kitchen on the lower level, and up a couple of steps is the mezzanine, which has a lovely workspace, another closet and a 6-foot by 27-inch washroom with shower and composting toilet (the kitty litter box is in here too, with kitty poo smells vented out with the help of a computer fan).

One of the best parts of the design is the awesome pull-out bed, which is hidden under the mezzanine level. It solves that head-conking problem with conventional tiny home gabled roofs, with the exposed steps also serving as extra storage.

Punctuating it with a lot of adorable Japanese knick-knacks, Mori loves her new home so far and has dubbed it "Thousand Crow." It's currently parked on rented land in an RV park, but Mori can easily move it anywhere she wants to in the future -- one of the perks of living tiny.

You can read more over at The Province and see more images over on Imgur.