NEVER TOO SMALL Australian Apartment Style Tiny Home -27sqm/291sqft

This episode of Never Too Small is brought to you by ReDecor, a unique and free-to-play interior design game available now on Android and iOS. This particular location we flooded in October. This building was sitting atop this concrete structure with floodwaters surrounding the building. Yeah, it looked like a houseboat. Yeah, so it was a pretty breathtaking sort of image. The house is located in Rosebrook on the outskirts of Port Ferry. It's in a beautiful floodway that was Gunditjmara land, and it sits in the ruins of an old flour mill. This house is nine metres by roughly 3.3 metres, which gives it a total floor area of just under 30 square metres. With the mezzanine level, you get a total floor area of 40 square metres. It's designed with a fully off-grid solar system with batteries and a backup generator, and it's designed largely to be a passive house. The road restrictions mean you can't transport anything on a freeway that's over five metres tall, so that does restrict these buildings somewhat to a certain ceiling height, which can make the spaces feel a bit more cramped. That's why we designed this building to have an expandable roof section. The way that this telescopic frame works is the wall panels fold in on themselves, and then the roof can be expanded by operating a wheel, which winds a cog system that pushes the whole roof structure up by 1200 millimetres. Then the panels fold back down to complete your wall sections. The cypress that we clad the building in are fouled old cypress windbreaks from local farmlands. They're normally pushed into a pile and burnt. We decided to mill the timber and clad our building in it. It created both a beautiful aesthetic, but also meant capturing a lot of carbon, which we thought was pretty important. We found the concrete slabs in a paddock. Its original purpose was to hold up cow troughs, but they seem perfect as a floating staircase. We also scrounged metal mesh from an abandoned pigshed, and the beauty of that is that you can scrape your dirty boots off before entering the house. The design was intended to feel like a New York style apartment, that appropriate for a regional setting. The design also explores the use of materials that have been recycled or restored. The double height of the lounge room gives it an additional sense of space. The lower section is encased by steel glass windows. The glass section of the living area juts out from the rest of the building slightly. When you're sitting on the couch, you're sitting more in nature. It pushes you out into the environment. Copper and ply louvers run horizontally along those windows, giving the opportunity for ventilation to come out through the building. We have pivot doors on the south and western sides of the lounge room. So in summertime, you can open all the doors and have maximum airflow. The western side, you can actually just sit on the ground and dangle your legs over the edge. The raised mezzanine gave us an opportunity to capitalise on some extra storage, as well as separating the living area from the kitchen area. And it gives you ample storage under the floor for the things you don't use on a daily basis. So the kitchen's got a two burner gas cooktop, an extra sized sink because the sink has to perform a number of functions in a small area. It's got a relatively small fridge and ample storage cupboards. The above sink drying rack means you're not wasting valuable bench space. You can put the dishes straight up out of the way as soon as you've washed them. The sliding door operates as the bathroom door, but it reveals this hidden storage component. We chose to use a glass splashback so you can still see the beautiful texture of the spotted gum. And again, the pig mesh was used for some shelving to bring in that rustic feel. The kitchen table has piano hinges that run along both sides for easy access and just to alleviate some space while you're working away at the kitchen. The ladder, which runs to the mezzanine area, can be wound up using the same mechanism that winds the roof up. So once you wind that ladder out of your way, the dining space becomes much more ample. And the advantage of having a raised living area is you can sit on that surface at the dining table. We felt that the home office was a very important aspect of any house moving into the future. That's why Nick designed this really clever home office space in the mezzanine. It utilizes the space perfectly because you can sit on the floor with your feet dangling on this beautiful plinth and get amazing views out of the windows at the same time. And then we decided to put a bit of a bookcase easily accessible to you right there and chose to have a wall and a bookcase and a storage case that broke up the office from the bedroom. The ridgeline of the roof is shunted off center so that you could get this walkable space through the mezzanine area. The bedroom has everything you'd expect. A wardrobe, a cupboard and drawers underneath the bed. We've got a mixture of fixed glazing and louvers in the bedroom. The fixed glazing gives you an amazing view and the louvers create excellent crossflow ventilation. The colors are still dark to create that sense of the outside is more important. While also making you feel very cozy. Yeah. In the bathroom we chose to go with a bluestone cobble. These cobbles, they're basically offcuts from the factory that they tumble and get these beautiful rounded edges. They make the bathroom feel quite luxurious but also very earthy and understated. It creates a very nice experience when complemented with the slats of spotted gum on the ceiling. The windows are pretty large so it makes you feel as if you're showering in the outdoors. For the shy we've got these beautiful louvers that you can then close and feel as if you're less exposed. We also used brass elements that have been recycled for the handrail toilet holders and in the vanity area. Every surface you touched and felt really made you feel like you were connecting to an earthy sort of experience. The plumbing has a composting toilet and a grey water retention system. The design philosophy of Small is that we just want to shift the attitude towards living within your means. As we evolve as a community we are going to understand that bigger is not better in a small space, not only is it better for the environment but it's also better for human interaction and your interaction with the outdoors. This episode of Never Too Small is sponsored by ReDecor, a unique and free-to-play interior design game. ReDecor is a surprisingly fun app that allows you to flex your design muscles by responding to design briefs for bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens and more. Every design you create is a competition against other users from around the world with the best designs voted on and ranked. Have you ever thought how you would style Monica's living room from Friends if you were one of the gang? Well, ReDecor is now giving you the chance to decorate it however you want. So what would Monica's apartment look like if it was designed by Never Too Small? It would certainly lean towards a minimalist style. We'd show some restraint with materials, choosing just two or three. And what about this colour for the trims? Yes, I think that will do. Can you do better? Download ReDecor now from the link in the video description. Available now free on Android and iOS.