The tiny house movement, and what it is becoming in Morocco

Long before the word, there was the cabin. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a house of about 14 m² on the shore of Walden Pond, in Massachusetts. He lived there for two years and wrote a book, Walden, that asks a question still worth asking: what do we really need to live well?

Where the movement comes from

The modern movement took shape in the United States in the late 1990s. In 1998, architect Sarah Susanka published The Not So Big House, a case for homes that are better designed rather than bigger. Around the same time, Jay Shafer built his own home of a few square metres on a trailer, then founded the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company to design more.

Two events sped things up. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, architect Marianne Cusato designed the "Katrina Cottages", small homes of about 30 m² to rehouse families quickly. Then the 2008 financial crisis led many Americans to look differently at the price of a house and the weight of a mortgage.

Why the wheels

In the United States, many tiny houses are built on trailers. The reason is mostly regulatory: on wheels, the house falls under vehicle rules rather than building codes, which sidesteps the minimum floor areas many towns impose. The format was shaped as much by regulation as by a wish to travel.

What the movement brought

Beyond size, tiny houses made several ideas visible:

• the right floor area, where every square metre has a use;
• carefully chosen materials, since few are needed;
• building in a workshop, under cover, then transporting to the land;
• a home you can live in without thirty years of debt.

In Morocco, a different story

In Morocco, tiny houses came in through a different door. You find them mostly in ecolodges, camps and family land, wherever people want to host or live close to the landscape without starting heavy building works. A trailer makes little sense here: people look for a home that is set down, well oriented, and comfortable through summer heat and cold mountain nights.

That is what led us from the words "tiny house" to modular home. Our homes, from 18 to 35 m², are made in our workshop in Marrakech, then set in a few days on reversible foundations, with no concrete. They keep the spirit of the movement, the right floor area and workshop building, with cork insulation from the Maâmora forest designed for the Moroccan climate.

Living small, and well

A good small house needs more design than a large one: where the bed sits in relation to the window, the ceiling height, the view you frame from the table. That work is what makes a 28 m² place feel just right.

If you are thinking about a retreat or an ecolodge, our brochure presents our models and how we adapt them to each piece of land.