SubscribeSign In
All Photos/exterior/building type : house/building type : tiny home

Exterior House Tiny Home Design Photos and Ideas

The façade unfolds to reveal the bedroom windows.
The 275-square-foot LOVT prefab is a feast of crisp millwork, with a modular daybed stacked on drawers and kitchen cabinets with cutouts for pulls.
A family chose MyCabin to construct prefab structures in their home country of Latvia. The prefab structures have space for work, sleep, and relaxation.
The cabin is available to rent all year long, and only accessible by foot, skis, and snowshoes. Transport carts or sleds are available to bring in gear.
Wild bush, sand dunes, and scrub surround the circular home on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. The Austin Maynard Architects team was careful to minimize the building’s impact on the fragile landscape.
With its stucco facade and steel-framed, arched windows, Plaster Fun House is an architectural anomaly amidst the cottages and 1960s brick residences of Torrensville in South Australia.
Garcia clad the ADU’s exterior with a local Texas limestone, similar in color and texture to the main house, “just to tie the two together visually,” says the architect.
The strip between the glass panels is Ipe, same as the deck, it’s just retained its original hue beneath the four-foot-deep overhangs. The deck is wrapped in a steel channel, in a nod to the steel used inside.
Architect Matt Garcia designed a 540-square-foot ADU for a musician’s 1960s ranch style home in Ashland. The large lot size, about an acre, meant that Garcia could have doubled the size of the new build, but he preferred the challenge of keeping it smaller.
Winkelman Architecture delivers grown-up summer-camp vibes with this unassuming retreat on the coast of Maine.
The Bracy Cottage — Front Facade
The Bracy Cottage — Front Facade
This compact vacation home by TACO—or, Taller de Arquitectura Contextual—is immersed in southeastern Mexico’s wild landscape. The home is designed for a pair of young adults, and the firm’s objective was to achieve a reflective and contemplative place that links the occupants with the surrounding environment. The result is an intuitive, functional, and simple living experience that offers great spatial warmth.
Casa Parasito effortlessly provides accommodations for two people in a cleverly unique location: the rooftop of a city building in San Juan, Ecuador. El Sindicato Arquitectura wanted to not only provide a home, but also contribute positively to the densification challenge that the city’s inhabitants face. The design concept hinges on an A-frame facade. Within, an interior layout is marked by a rectangular core—also the main social/living space—from which all other utilitarian spaces, such as the kitchen, dining area, bathroom, bed, work area, and storage are accessed.
The firm wanted the materiality of the cabin to be "in harmony with the site," says Shaw. "So, that over time, the building could weather gracefully and the site around it would change, and they would do so in tandem."
The materials were kept simple: a foundation of board-formed concrete that reveals the wood grain of the boards used to make it, Cor-Ten steel siding that will develop a characterful patina, and rafters made of hemlock, a local species. "In terms of materials, we wanted the full exterior of the building to be something that would weather gracefully, that required very little maintenance, and that had a long life cycle," says Shaw.
Sited on a rock ledge, the Far Cabin’s screened porch cantilevers over the forest floor for a tree house effect.
The Far Cabin by Winkelman Architecture is set on the forested coast of Maine.
The 1.5-kilometer road leading to the cabin is well maintained, although Dignard cautions against low-suspension vehicles, and recommends good winter tires for access.
On one side of the A-frame, an empty volume tucked beneath the sloping roofline creates a sheltered porch with a hammock. Homes in Le Maelström are intended to be eco-friendly. La Cabin is off-grid and powered with solar panels.
La Cabin Ride & Sleep sits on an 11-acre parcel in Le Maelström, a vacation community in the town of Lac-Beauport, in Quebec.
The fully glazed north faced overlooks a private garden to the rear. This large area of glazing allows natural light to fill the home.
The South elevation features a single glazed section, which maintains privacy for the homeowners. It also increases the thermal efficiency of the home in a location that experiences extremes of temperature, with hot dry summers that top 35°C and cold winters where the temperature often drops below zero.
Bench seating is built into the exterior of the home, beneath the living room window. Deep eaves protect the home from the strong sun in summer months.
Asphalt shingles wrap around the east facade and onto the roof, allowing the home to be read as a simple, visually unified form.
“I love the simple gabled form with its contrasting claddings with the dark asphalt shingles contrasting with the warmth of the wood,” says architect Barry Condon.
The home is defined by a simple gable form clad in asphalt shingles and larch weatherboards. With a combination of passive house measures and structural insulated panels, virtually no additional energy is required to maintain a consistent level of thermal comfort against the backdrop of the unforgiving New Zealand alpine climate.
All lightHouses come with custom OxBox (oxidized steel) and Barn (wood) siding, as well as a collection of unique exterior steel features.
The first Plant Prefab–built modular lightHouse ADU was completed earlier this spring in Sebastopol, California. This 423-square-foot lightHouse was completed for around $285,000. That figure breaks down to approximate costs of $210,000 for design, engineering and production; $60,000 for infrastructure and site work; and $15,000 for shipping and installation.
Pictured is a rendering of a 570-square-foot 2X lightHouse with a one-bedroom unit stacked atop a two-car garage.
The gable decoration is a Viking element traditionally used to protect homes from danger. The “moon” shape comes from the shape of Viking horns.
Campo Loft is a blend of industrial architecture and the natural materials found in the surrounding valleys. It is a contemporary residence where contrast plays a large role—old and new, sleek and rustic, light and dark, rough and soft.
In thinking about the worldwide lack of reliable water, sanitation, food, and electricity—and the fact that housing sector contributes more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions—the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture and the New Haven, Connecticut–based architecture firm Gray Organschi Architecture designed and constructed a 230-square-foot home called the Ecological Living Module (ELM). The construction is a fully off-grid housing prototype that was designed to take advantage of sustainable materials, green technology, and simple construction methods. There's a a rainwater harvesting system, a solar system that provides 100 percent of the building’s energy needs, and a graywater system that irrigates food-producing plants that mark the building’s west facade.
Designed and built by Oakland–based O2 Treehouse, the Pinecone is a five-and-a-half-ton geodesic home that can be installed in the forest or in your own backyard. The treehouse, accessed via a wood ladder and a trap door, is constructed from steel, wood, and glass that integrates into the forest canopy. Inside, 64 diamond-shaped windows provide 360-degree views of the surrounding forest or landscape. Even the floors are composed of transparent panels—enhancing the sensation of floating above the earth.
Perched quietly on the dunes of New Zealand’s Coromandel Peninsula, Hut on Sleds serves as a small, sustainable beach retreat for a family of five.
Black-framed windows and doors tie in with the black metal roof and dark chimney.
The simple structures are a modern play on the traditional cabin with wood-clad exteriors and gabled roofs.
Marilyn Monroe is said to have stayed in the charming guesthouse.
Tiny homes have officially become a thing—and these woodsy getaways will make you want to downsize ASAP.
The exterior is wrapped in cement fiber boards with a Cembrit patina finish. Due to a lack of onshore infrastructure, a big challenge of the project was the addition of self-contained sewage and clear water tanks.
Along the opposite side, sheets of self-rusting Corten steel run along the home, hiding stairs to the upper deck behind them. The striking facade contrasts with the otherwise muted exterior.
For maximum privacy, the bridge leads directly to the home's entrance, bypassing a walk-around deck that is typically found on houseboat or floating home designs. Along the front half of the roof, permanent vegetation adds greenery in the summer months.
"The building form was intentionally asymmetric and clad in hand-stained, split-face shakes and metal," says Campos Studio.
Now that the daughter lives just steps away from her mother, Campos says, "The laneway has reunited the family and provided a house that reflects their cultural heritage in a subtle but significant way."
O’Donnell not only builds tiny houses, but lives in them as well, first in the Los Padres model and now in the Acorn. He downsized from the Los Padres to the smaller Acorn model after fires in California made him want to be more mobile.
The architects inserted skylights in an artful pattern in the rooftop.
At night, the exterior screen provides privacy when the house is illuminated.
The Ecological Living Module (ELM) was installed at the UN Headquarters in New York City for two months.
Per the Kebony website, their wood products are composed of sustainable softwoods that have been modified with a bio-based liquid to give them the characteristics of hardwoods, making the end result hardy and durable.
An open living space greets you at the door. The exterior wood will gain a natural silver patina over time, melding with the concrete of the interior.
The 753-square-foot retreat has two bedrooms and a bath, and takes advantage of its rocky site.
Guarding against coastal erosion, the 430-square-foot retreat rests on two thick wooden sleds which allow the structure to be readily relocated when needed.
After living ten years in another house he designed in Yokahama, Hosaka and his wife decided to move to Tokyo for an easier commute.
In accordance with the brief, the firm left the landscape largely in its natural state.
The geometric wall on one side acts as a screen to protect the structure from winds and noise. It also provides privacy for the living areas oriented towards the back of the house.
The Monte House spans just two floors and 452 square feet. The firm employed folding doors with operable louvers of regional cedar wood (seen here in the upper window) to allow the occupants to control their level of contact between the interior and the exterior.
The petite prefab cabin only took eight days to assemble once arriving to Switzerland.
To take in views of Victoria’s coastline from all directions, Austin Maynard Architects crafted a bach-inspired beach house using a circular, corridor-free design and full-height glazing. Exposed trusses and a simple material palette keep focus on the outdoors, while rooftop solar panels and a rainwater harvesting system help the dwelling reduce site impact.
Framing picturesque views of a small valley and nearby orchard, Baumhaus Halden is comprised of a steel frame with four wooden support beams.
12