Student at CCAD designs tiny home

On Wednesday, Columbus College of Art & Design student Tobias Katz will welcome visitors his senior project.

While other students show off their portfolios and PowerPoint presentations during the annual “Chroma: Best of CCAD” event, Katz will show off a house.

On a parking lot next to the college’s Canzani Center, Katz fashioned a fully furnished home out of a 20-by-8-foot steel shipping container, complete with bathroom, kitchen and sitting/sleeping area.

“I’ve had the idea of building a tiny house ever since spring break my freshman year,” said Katz, a 2013 graduate of Pickerington Central High School.

As Katz progressed through CCAD, so too did his idea. Instead of simply building a home, Katz now hopes to build a business. He teamed up with five other students to create the “Katz Box” company, designed to provide tiny-home kits to consumers.

“I didn’t want to build just one tiny house. I wanted to create a tiny home for everyone,” Katz said. “I wanted to create a system, like an Ikea kit, that can be easily altered.”

His goal is to sell Katz Boxes that can be shipped fully finished (around $60,000) or ready to be

finished (around $40,000).

The Katz Box home and idea is impressive enough. Just as impressive is Katz’s resourcefulness in finding sponsors. Katz persuaded companies to donate virtually everything for his model home, starting with the shipping container itself, courtesy of the ContainerPort Group in Columbus.

The construction firm Corna Kokosing trucked the container to CCAD. Airstream USA donated a ceiling fan. Ecohouse Solar donated solar panels. Wilsonart contributed counters. The Romanoff Group chipped in electrical components. Katz even persuaded an Australian company, LevTec, to send its system that helps lay floor tile.

“We got everything from screws to the container itself,” Katz said. “That was the hard part.”

In all, Katz values the donations at $30,000.

“That is extremely unusual,” said Tom Gattis, the dean of CCAD’s School of Design Arts. “It’s usually deans and chairs and administrators trying to find these donations, not students. If he learns nothing else in his time here, that alone will take him very far in his career.”

So what to do with a 5,000-square-foot house when school is over?

“I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with it,” Katz said. “Maybe take it to some festivals.”