I Turned this 100sqft Historic Tiny House into an Incredible Compact Home

Until I started this channel I hadn't really come across any toll houses or been aware of them as being such a specific architectural phenomenon of the 19th century but I now keep seeing them and I actually just love how distinctive they are. They come up for sale every now and again and that's how I came across this one after a viewer sent it to me. It's on the Monmouth and Brecon canals so holds this prominent position by the water with views up and down the length of it and I think that's one of the things that I really like about these toll houses that they sort of embody their context. If you think about it the shape that they're built in, which can be anything from square up to octagonal, that shape is determined by all the routes of travel that interact with it so huge distances between towns and villages on a map that can seem random and scattered can all be condensed down into one little regular structure at a point of interaction. Maybe it's over complicating things to think about it like that but I really like that sense of a story shaping a building. So this little toll house is a square to fit alongside the straight line of the canal and it has a tiny floor area of only 9.4 square meters. It has two stories and a little bit of land around it. There's no internal access between the stories so the top floor is currently accessed via an external staircase. The bottom floor has a door going directly into it from the exterior and you can see the head height in here is pretty limited. The ground floor has two small windows and the top floor has three large ones so I guess that's where the toll keepers spent their days. There's a corner fireplace and brick chimney on the first floor too and pretty much nothing else. The height from ground to eaves is about 5.3 meters so the key to using the floor area in this building to make it entirely habitable is going to be in how that height is used. The challenge we set ourselves was to try and stay within the footprint of the building for this exercise because it's the standalone nature of the building that's part of its charm and because with the right concept it's possible to fit everything you need into this space. Currently the stairs are on the exterior of the property but we'd like to get everything inside so that the full height of the space can be used. Our sense was that the concept that will unlock this interior will need to play with the whole vertical volume in small strategic ways to really eke out the individual functional areas of the space. This would require much more flexibility than is possible while retaining this intermediate floor so our first step would be to remove this floor and look at the whole volume in one go and that also gets rid of the issue of the ground floor having a very low head height and the upper floor having more head height than is needed. Our approach was to try and create sort of vertical stepping stones between activity spaces so instead of having one staircase you'd have multiple small level changes hopping from living to kitchen to bedroom but it turned out the building was just too small to allow the floor area to accommodate the necessary stair space and head heights to achieve that. We knew that the best place for the bathroom was going to be on the ground floor and our instinct was to incorporate that under the stairs somehow. If you do that with traditional stairs though the whole ground floor would be given over to the staircase and bathroom and with only enough height in the building for two stories that just didn't seem efficient enough to us. So the conclusion we reached was that we just need to make the stair as compressed as possible and that is achievable using a stair with alternating treads. Now I know they aren't viable for many people or most regulations but when space is really limited and they're allowed this sort of stair is a really clever way of getting from A to B and with its steeper pitch it opens up the space beneath it to be used to. So now the ground floor can contain the staircase with storage hidden beneath it to accommodate a washing machine and some small items in the steps, a small living area facing the entrance door and a bathroom which even has its own window. If the front door was glazed that would allow views out to the garden and bring more light into this small space and you could use the area under the sofa for some storage. So I talked about the low ceiling height in the original layout which at only two meters isn't ideal for this whole space as it just makes it oppressive. The benefit of the lower ceiling height however would be fewer steps to the stair as that means less floor space given over to it. It's also the level at which this upper door threshold is at and that's not something we want to lose. So retaining the lower ceiling level over the bathroom only means that the stair can be reduced and the upper door can have level access outside. If we raise the floor area over the living area though you get a much more comfortable head height on the ground floor. How that works structurally though was the crux of whether this would be possible and our gut feeling was that solving this problem would unlock the whole concept. Our solution was to run a beam across the top of the walls and suspend this raised floor level with steel wires. This would take up the minimum space while providing strength and a slender screen to contain the stair edge of the floor platform. So now we have a split in the levels and an opportunity to use this level change to define separate functional spaces. From this intermediate floor you can either go right at the top of the stairs and step out to the small balcony which is all that we would retain from the existing external staircase or you can go left and access a small kitchen. The sink would sit on the lower level so that the plumbing can run down inside the wall and a slim worktop above some storage cupboards could sit on the raised platform level while still being flush as a work surface. The construction of the suspended platform would allow for some extra depth in these cupboards and even a small hatch in the floor but we would keep this gap between the platform and lower level open to allow a little more light downstairs and just emphasize the floating platform visually and using a different material to form this step up to the platform has the same effect. So I'm sure you're wondering by now where the bedroom is and I'll get to that in just a moment because if you're enjoying the puzzle of this design then you'll love the problem-solving lessons offered by this video's brand partner Brilliant. I talk about Brilliant a lot in these videos because their interactive learning platform offers the same principles of hands-on learning as you get when you follow a design education. Practicing with professionals to solve real world puzzles is so much more effective than passively trying to consume information, six times more effective in fact and the way Brilliant creates snappy impactful lessons on complex subjects like programming, math and data analysis means you end up both knowledge and time rich because you only need a few minutes a day to do them. I found maths really hard at school and was actually put off studying architecture because I thought it was all maths based. It's not by the way. What I've realized though is that I'm a visual learner and if I could have learnt like this through diagrams and interactivity it may have been a whole different story. So it's never too late to learn new things and you never know you may discover you're a natural programmer. To try everything Brilliant has to offer and get an amazing 30 days for free use the link below which is brilliant.org forward slash Gemma and you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. So you have a raised floating platform and here you have space to sit and eat or to work at a desk. This table can actually be folded into three different sizes and you can find it in my shop in the description. When you want to go to bed you would hang up the chairs, fold away the table, go back into the kitchen and wind this handle to lower the bed down. It would come all the way down and rest on the suspended platform to turn this space into your bedroom. Making the space flexible like this means you can benefit from the height of the building without needing to introduce more stairs and while this might be difficult to live with long term I think it would be pretty fun to experience for a short stay. Thank you as ever for watching, I hope you enjoyed this design and I'll see you next time.