Coronavirus led to this US$100,000 tiny home on wheels by New Zealand-based Build Tiny – the bright yet sleek Dark Horse
This housebuilder usually specialises in bespoke, client-designed projects, but its latest compact home is a ready-made crowd-pleaser featuring transformable furniture and sustainable off-grid solar power
If you thought that wealth automatically leads to sprawling mansions, think again – more and more people are eschewing large homes for tiny, more minimalist ones.
Build Tiny specialises in, you guessed it, building custom tiny homes that sit on trailer chassis. This one in particular has a bedroom, living space, kitchen with a breakfast bar, and a dual purpose laundry and bathroom.
But unlike most of the company’s little homes on wheels, the Dark Horse wasn’t created for or named by a client. Instead, it was designed and built in-house by the team of builders that then had to come up with and vote on its name, the latter a task that’s normally delegated to the client.
“A ‘dark horse’ is a term usually used to refer to someone that was previously taken for granted, but rose to prominence in a situation – something akin to an underdog success story,” Build Tiny’s director and designer Gina Stevens said in an email interview.
“That’s how we view ourselves as a company in some ways, and also the tiny house is quite unassuming from the outside, but has a few surprises on the inside.”
During this time, two of its clients pulled out of their plans to order a tiny home, leaving only three units in the workshop instead of the typical five.