Colossal lifestyle benefits for tiny house dwellers
A new book lifts the roof on the people who live in tiny homes.
It’s written by former Spartacus gladiator and host of international YouTube show about the phenomenon, Bryce Langston.
The 34-year-old from Auckland’s North Shore and partner Rasa Pescud, 27, a former pilates instructor from Hamilton, spend two to four months on the road at a time filming episodes around the world.
They’ve profiled homes throughout New Zealand, Japan, Australia, USA and Canada. Europe is on the agenda next year.
Home for the couple is Langston’s newly-finished tiny house parked on a permaculture property at Waimauku, near a pirate ship treehouse which features in his new book.
The 6.6m-long, 4.2m-high,
2.5m-wide tiny house cost about
60,000 including off-grid technology.
The book, in stores nationwide from Wednesday, features more than
50 tiny houses and their owners from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, the United States and Canada.
It features Napier couple Francois and Sarah-Lee Guittenit who manage to live in their tiny house with their three children. It measures just 7m x
3m.
It also features a biologist and director of a gibbon conservation centre who moved her tiny home on to the site so she could always be near the apes, as well as a couple who built a pirate ship treehouse. At a lofty 193cm, Langston admits he is “perhaps the last person you would expect to live in a tiny house”.
“The tiny house movement is really becoming popular in all the areas where people are finding the affordability of housing just getting out of control,” said Langston, whose YouTube channel has almost one million subscribers.
“I’ve seen it go from a very fringe concept to something that is definitely now what I would consider to be a mainstream concept.”
The Bachelor of Communications graduate from Auckland University of Technology is a musician, filmmaker and actor, including playing bad-boy character Ashton Fuller on
Shortland Street and a gladiator on
Spartacus: Blood and Sand.
But as he points out in his book, he found there was “an unfortunate disconnect between doing what came naturally to me and earning money”.
“It’s a home that I can own outright without any debt, which means that instead of needing to worry how to find money for rent (or a mortgage) every single week, I can actually focus on doing things in life that I’m passionate about.” Funding from YouTube advertising supplemented by sponsorship aligned to his show, Living Big In A Tiny House,
which is the same name as his book, means he now has financially stability, Langston said.
The average tiny house price in New Zealand is about $50,000-100,000.
“I’ve seen them built here in New Zealand, if you recycle all the materials and you’re doing all of the labour yourself — for under $20,000,” Langston said.
Living Big in a Tiny House, By Bryce
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Langston, (Potton & Burton RRP $49.99)