The smallest little house on the prairie
This tiny house was never meant to be a tiny house, and it certainly wasn’t Keith Lovelock’s intention to have strangers, like us, staying in it. ‘‘It was meant to be my den,’’ says the builder and owner. Lovelock has a lot of antiques, and when his wife, Jen, asked him to sort out his collection, he decided to simply move it to a shed in the garden.
‘‘I thought, I’ll make a little shed out in the garden and it’ll be on a couple of telephone polls. Then it took on a life of its own. People starting turning up to watch progress.’’
A 125-year-old pump house, found rotting in a swamp on the family farm in the backblocks of the Rangitı¯kei region, provided the skeleton for the new structure. From there, the Marton local, formerly an engineer, fitted it out with second-hand goods he sourced mainly through Trade Me, and his own colonialthemed furnishings, such as an oldschool Ericsson phone.
‘‘It’s partly the Scottish heritage, too,’’ he says, putting on an accent. ‘‘I don’t like to pay for anything if I can possibly upcycle it.’’
While Kiwis have a long history of living in small spaces — from goldmining shacks to shearers’ quarters and hunters’ huts — the modern iteration of the movement hit our shores about two years ago, Lovelock reckons.
Touted as being financially-friendly, especially when average house prices in Auckland and Wellington are $1.06 million and $644,567 respectively, a tiny house is often more expensive to build per square metre than other homes.
‘‘There’s a lot of Kiwi [tiny house] communities online and a common question is, ‘How much should I pay for a tiny house?’ It depends if you spend money to save time or spend time to save money,’’ Lovelock says.
He chose to spend time to save money – ‘‘a lot of time’’.
‘‘Messing about’’ for a year without a proper job, he spent $8000 on materials and fittings. ‘‘But is that worth $50,000-$70,000 to me? Yes. So, it depends which way you want to go about it.’’
From the main house, the tiny house is just visible, a small structure sitting atop a hill in a back paddock. Measuring 3 metres by 5m, it’s no bigger than a caravan.
A loft bed and fold-out sofa provide two separate sleeping areas. There’s a short kitchen bench, a miniature potbelly stove, an office nook with a desk and chair, and a bathroom 1.8m in length (it’s possible to sit on the toilet and put your feet in the shower, which, it’s also worth mentioning, is made out of half an old metal suitcase).
‘‘The one big stuff-up there is the fridge,’’ Lovelock says, referring to the bar fridge that sits under the desk.
‘‘It ended up under the office because this was never meant to be an Airbnb.’’
During the planning process, he was following George Clarke’s show, Amazing Spaces, and the Kiwi tiny house YouTuber Bryce Langston.
‘‘I thought, well, how hard can it be?’’ Afterwards, Lovelock’s sons listed the place on Airbnb, priced at $109 per night, and before their parents knew it, they were verified super-hosts.
After our first night in the tiny house, Lovelock congratulated us for surviving, and invited us over for coffee and hotcross buns. (His wife, a nurse, was away working at the local hospital.)
Often guests come seeking inspiration for their own tiny builds, he tells us.
‘‘We had some chaps staying here, and they were into craft beer. They left deciding their weekend bolthole was going to be a mini bar.’’
Having a theme to these spaces helps draw people in. Pointing out the window, he adds: ‘‘That’s colonial, it’s all analogue, you’re going 100 years back in time.
‘‘People come here and realise there’s no wi-fi or television, and their cellphones don’t work, so they have to drop all that stuff and step out of the modern world. But that’s only this example.’’
He tells us about his next project: an old silo on its side attached to an upended spa pool, together transformed into a yellow submarine.
‘‘You can just imagine what the farmers up the road are saying about me now,’’ he says, chuckling.
●➤ Superfad is a seven-part podcast series, brought to you by Skoda. A new episode is released every Friday on iTunes and Stitcher. Join the Superfad group on Facebook and look out for behind-thescenes extras in a weekly Facebook Live discussion every Monday.