The coronavirus pandemic, which drove people from the cities to the countryside, hastened the phenomenon of minimalist holiday living, thinks the author of the new book Tiny house Radek Váňa. With his team from Idealab, he mapped the varied landscape of companies that offer wooden buildings, containers or mobile homes in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The team worked on the book Tiny house: A guide to the landscape of minimalist living in the Czech and Slovak Republics for about a year. “In the editorial office of Archizoom magazine, which is part of the Idealab studio, we found that we have more and more articles on this topic, so we decided to prepare a larger material about tiny houses. We mapped the market and found out that it offers hundreds of such products from various companies and architects,” Váňa describes the impulse that ultimately led to the writing of the guide.
According to him, there are currently over 140 companies on the market that offer some form of minimalist housing. 35 of them ended up in the book. “We determined the main criteria that helped us to narrow down the assortment a little. All the buildings in the book are designed by Czech and Slovak companies. They are produced on the territory of the given country and are commercial products. There are a lot of people who have designed designer tiny houses , but it doesn’t offer repeatability – that is, that the customer will be able to buy them,” he says.
According to him, the rise in popularity of mini-homes was mainly accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. “People wanted to escape from the city to somewhere in nature. The second thing is that recreational housing is becoming less and less available. A cottage is, in short, an expensive investment. The advantage of minimalist housing is financial availability and speed. If a person contacts an established company, he can have his house for a fortnight,” he says.
Although Radek Váňa describes tiny houses as a phenomenon, he personally thinks that the demand for them will rather weaken in the coming years. “I think we are now at the time when this wave is culminating. The market is oversaturated and there are simply too many companies doing business with tiny houses,” he says. According to him, in the future, small housing will be more for experiential tourism. “Buying a house that is worth something is not cheap. Most buyers then try to recoup their investment with short-term rentals,” adds the head of Idealab.
The book, which is officially published at the beginning of May, shows a diverse range of typical mini houses with different designs, materials, uses and sizes. The smallest type of building is just over five square meters, the largest ends at thirty-two meters. Mini houses range in price from 400,000 to approximately four million crowns.
Check out some of them.
