It takes a visionary mind to look at a beaten-up metal door and the unfinished garage space inside and see the opportunity for a ultra-modern tiny home, but when French Photographer Jérémie Buchholz wanted to find a place to live in Bordeaux, he decided not to rent, but to reinvent.
With the aid of his architect friend Matthieu de Merien, he planned out a simple and elegant solution to transform the old garage. You’ve see the before and after pictures, but a video tour shows so much more.
His home might have less than 700 square feet of space, but clever storage and a vertical floorplan let Buchholz live in relative comfort and style, for 80,000 euros less than an apartment of the same size. The single piece of furniture that dominates his main room is a functional multipurpose creation, a so-called “room within a room” that gives Buchholz the most livable space possible in this tiny building.
The tiny house movement is gaining popularity, in America and abroad, suggesting that projects like this may become more common. Tiny houses are oftentimes smaller than 400 square feet and sometimes built on trailer beds so that they can be transported. Others design tiny living spaces in existing apartments, like Seattle’s Steve Sauer and his 182-square-foot experiment. People involved in the movement build their own tiny homes for a fraction of the cost of a typical mortgage, focusing on sustainable, affordable, simplified living. They draw inspiration from everything from minimalist architects to Thoreau’s Walden.
This is an amazing transformation, turning this tiny garage into a tiny house. We wonder if there’s going to be a surge of people asking to buy or rent garages now, in hopes of making their own cube home!
Could you live in this tiny garage? Is it a dream compared to any apartment you’ve ever had, or just a claustrophobia-inducing oddity? The little bathroom and flood-prone patio seem like sticking points to us, but is the tradeoff worth it? Let us know what you think by using the buttons on the left side of the page!
