Over the years, I have spent much time perfecting my approach to designing tiny houses. Through this process, I have developed a simple, effective way to create beautiful, functional tiny homes. I am thrilled to announce that my Tiny House Design System is now available for everyone.
The Tiny House Design System consists of compatible house forms, like building blocks, that can be combined to create a custom design tailored to your needs. With hundreds of cross-section drawings included, you won’t have to worry about calculating the dimensions yourself.
Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a novice designer, the Tiny House Design System is an indispensable resource for your toolkit. It is available in both ebook and print formats, making it easily accessible to anyone interested in designing their own tiny home.
Before making a purchase, I invite you to check out my YouTube Channel, where I explain how the system works and provide tips on how to use it effectively. Don’t hesitate to leave any questions in the comments section.
Never stop dreaming, designing, and innovating. The Tiny House Design System gives you everything you need to bring your tiny home vision to life.
Patterns surround us in every aspect of our lives, serving as a universal language that bridges the gap between human intuition and design. When we encounter a familiar pattern, our response is almost instinctive – we know how to interact. A button invites a click, a coffee cup suggests how to drink from it, and a front door naturally guides us through its threshold.
Master designers harness these patterns to make the novel feel familiar and the complex feel simple. They create experiences so intuitively that they require no instruction manual and no learning curve. The best designers possess an almost sixth sense of pattern recognition, constantly observing and cataloging what works around them. This heightened awareness of patterns becomes less of a conscious practice and more of an instinctive way of seeing the world.
This intuitive understanding is put to the scientific test in UX research. Researchers meticulously study how users interact with different patterns, tracking eye movements and analyzing decision-making processes. Sometimes, what appears as user error reveals a mismatch between designer assumptions and user intuition. These insights lead to designs that align with natural human behavior rather than fighting against it.
Patterns also serve as powerful tools for establishing visual hierarchy and priority. In digital design, we manipulate visual weight to guide users’ attention – buttons being the most obvious example. When multiple actions compete for attention, we create subtle variations in dominance to first lead users toward the most common or important actions. These patterns are then documented in style guides, ensuring consistency across the user experience.
My fascination with patterns spans three distinct mediums: digital products, architecture, and pottery. My journey began with pottery, culminating in a BFA in Ceramics, followed by studies in architecture – a field that continues to captivate me outside my professional life. I’ve worked in digital product development for nearly thirty years, wearing many hats in the industry. Despite the apparent differences between these disciplines, patterns emerge as the common thread that weaves through everything I create.
Christopher Alexander’s seminal work, “A Pattern Language,” approaches this concept from an architectural perspective, but its principles transcend medium-specific boundaries. The book reveals how patterns serve as a fundamental design language that can be adapted and applied across any creative discipline. Whether shaping clay, designing buildings, or crafting digital experiences, patterns remain the essential building blocks of intuitive and effective design.
This universal nature of patterns demonstrates that great design principles are rarely confined to a single medium. Instead, they reflect deeper truths about how humans interact with and understand the world around them. By recognizing and applying these patterns thoughtfully, designers across all disciplines can create work that feels both innovative and inherently familiar – that speaks to our fundamental human nature.
Image generated with the help of AI (ChatGPT & DALL·E).
I published the first edition of Tiny House Floor Plans back in 2012. It was a top-rated book, averaged four out of five stars on Amazon, and had almost 450 reviews the day I retired it in 2021.
Tiny houses were still small and simple back then. Most tiny homes were owner-built, and there were only a few professional builders in the business. A typical tiny house was about 20-feet long, had a 5-gallon bucket sawdust toilet, minimal off-grid power, and you took a ladder to get into the loft. For example, the tiny house that made the movement famous was Jay Shafer’s original Tumbleweed. This house measured only 12-feet long, including the porch, and had less than 100 square feet of interior floor space.
Sample page showing an 8×12 tiny house floor plan. There are 24 12-foot tiny house designs in the book.
Today, people expect more from a tiny house. A 20-foot tiny house is considered relatively small in size these days. Most tiny homes have stairs that take you to the loft, plus conventional toilets or commercially made composting toilets. The interiors are finished to high standards with modern appliances, laundry machines, full-size refrigerators, and lots of fine woodwork.
Sample page showing an 8×14 tiny house floor plan. There are 28 14-foot tiny house designs in the book.
I suspect a combination of a demand for the finer things and the tiny house television shows drove these changes. Nevertheless, as the Tiny House Movement grew, it had to accommodate a more diverse group of people with different needs, so the houses naturally grew and changed with the times.
Sample page showing an 8×16 tiny house floor plan. There are 32 16-foot tiny house designs in the book.
This is why it seemed about high time for me to redraw my book. You’ll find nothing from the original version is in these pages; all the drawings in this second edition are brand new. You’ll find over 350 tiny house floor plans of homes ranging from truly tiny 12-foot-long tiny houses to giant 36-foot long homes. Most designs have stairs, and some of the larger homes have two flights of stairs, each to their own loft. I’ve even tried to include a space for laundry machines in all the medium to large designs.
Sample page showing an 8×18 tiny house floor plan. There are 36 18-foot tiny house designs in the book.
All designs show a utility closet with an external access door. Too often, I see mechanical systems stuffed into tiny houses as afterthoughts. I think it’s best to plan ahead and carve out a place for these items, so they are kept separate from the living space. It’s safer, more convenient to access and repair, and this approach doesn’t rob you of valuable interior storage space.
Sample page showing an 8×20 tiny house floor plan. There are 44 20-foot tiny house designs in the book.
What I hope people will take away from this new edition is the inspiration to design and build your own tiny home. There are a million ways to layout a tiny house with all sorts of combinations still yet imagined. I hope my book gets you started on that path or at least feeds that creative flame that has already been sparked. I wish you well on your way to finding freedom in a tiny house.
Sample page showing an 8×24 tiny house floor plan. There are 48 24-foot tiny house designs in the book.Sample page showing an 8×28 tiny house floor plan. There are 48 28-foot tiny house designs in the book.Sample page showing an 8×32 tiny house floor plan. There are 48 32-foot tiny house designs in the book.
I stopped at 36-foot tiny house designs even though one could probably go up to 40 feet because when you add up the length of a typical truck plus the full length of a 36-foot tiny house you are very close to the legal limit of 65-feet for the entire truck and trailer.
Large heavy duty pickup trucks with crew cabs are just under 22-feet, plus a 6 foot trailer tongue, plus the length of the 36-foot house and you’re at 64 feet.
You could build a tiny house larger in width, length, and height than the legal road limit and get a special move permit when you wanted to move it, but why would you build so big? At that point the house is so big and expensive it might make more sense to built it on a foundation.
In other words – and in my humble opinion – tiny houses that are larger than 8′ x 36′ are probably in another class of housing like maybe we could call them ‘Giant Tinies’ or just stick with Park Model RV like the manufactured home industry likes to call them.
Anyway… that’s the long-winded reason I stopped at 36-feet and didn’t include any houses wider than legal road limit of 8.5-feet.
Sample page showing an 8×36 tiny house floor plan. There are 48 36-foot tiny house designs in the book.
The book is available now in print at Amazon. You can also order it as an ebook directly from me. Use the links provided here to find both the print version and downloadable ebook version.
I’ll be posting videos of how I draw the floor plans and how I would transform the designs into 3D drawings using SketchUp in the near future. I also setup a special website to focus on the book which you can find at TinyHouseFloorPlans.us.
Post your comments and questions below.
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