If you need to furnish a very small space, who you gonna call? IKEA, of course. The Swedish retail giant has transformed the world of home decorating. Now they've taken it one step further and collaborated with tiny homes designer and maker Escape to manufacture an IKEA tiny house!
The IKEA Tiny Home Project has involved designing and making a completely bespoke Vista Boho XL – one of the company's most popular tiny home designs. 'It was a natural pairing,” says Escape Homes founder, Dan Dobrowolski. 'We feature many Ikea products in our various tiny home designs around the country, as they mirror the renewable, reusable and recycled materials we incorporate into the actual structures.'
The home's exterior features Shou Sugi Ban (the Japanese technique of charred siding) and is built on Escape's custom trailer that easily hooks up to a vehicle and can be transported anywhere. Inside, the home is wrapped in ESCAPE’s signature sustainably grown pine and features Low-E, thermopane windows and energy-efficient lighting. IKEA's design team selected a metal roof, solar paneling and an on demand RV water heater to provide the home with off-grid capabilities.
'Our entire mission with ESCAPE Homes is to provide consumers with ways to simplify their lives, reduce their carbon footprint and live in a beautiful home,' says Dobrowolski. 'The IKEA Tiny Home Project illustrates that is is possible to live sustainably and affordably with style.'
If you've always been curious about off-grid living but have thought that it looks, to put mildly, uncomfortable, then this project may just change your mind. Sure, it is, well, tiny, but the clever design proves that most of us need a lot less space than we think that we do.
If you've always dreamed of living closer to nature, then having less space while being surrounded by breathtaking scenery may well be an acceptable trade-off.
The IKEA Tiny Home is in Rice Lake, WI.