Hey there, Jenna here!
Welcome to my channel where I take you on tours of unique homes.
Have you ever dreamed of living in a sleek, modern home straight
out of a magazine, but for a fraction of the cost?
Well, today we're traveling to a tiny house community in California
where one tiny home builder has figured out exactly that.
Inspired by modern mansions and five star hotels,
Nico's impressive tiny home does not lack in luxury.
His home features clever space saving designs, relaxing outdoor living areas,
and it provides him with a life free from the stress of a mortgage.
when people come, we want them to have the wow factor like, “Oh, wow,
this house can be in Beverly Hills for like $1,000,000 almost.” But it’s not.
It’s right here in a tiny house community.
Because most people want that life, but they can’t afford it.
And if you like videos like this where we showcase amazing builds,
make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell
so that you know every single time we publish a new video.
Hi, I'm Nicola, and this is my house.
Tiny Lux
I was born in France.
My parents are Vietnamese, and I moved to America at 16.
So at 16 I lived in Ohio for about 20 years
you had to have a place to stay.
And most of the time you work just to pay for that.
And I don't want to do that anymore,
I didn’t want stress anymore after twenty years of stress,
I decided to quit it and just start my life over.
I come from France- Mortgage means dying.
More.
It’s like you're giving your life to this mortgage for 30 years,
and at the end of the month, you don’t have anything left for you.
So why not just have a house that’s paid off, and you can live in it?
Be humble, live small.
So a tiny house made the best sense pretty much.
When I built it, it was actually in 2017.
So I did it myself.
I was a contractor, hired team of two workers
and I pretty much designed the whole floorplan on my iPad
And then we just start to by the material.
I just bought a trailer, it was a 28 foot trailer by eight.
Just a flat bed, we just build from there.
The idea was how can you make the house look luxurious, but still being small?
The goal was to make this space like a five star hotel almost.
Like, you come into a five star hotel, how big is the hotel?
It’s not that big. But you still love it. Because it’s nice.
Everything is modern, it’s new.
So why not make that into your house?
And so when people come, we want them to have the wow factor like, “Oh,
wow, this house can be in Beverly Hills for like $1,000,000 almost.”
But it’s not.
It’s right here in a tiny house community.
Because most people want that life, but they can’t afford it.
So it cost about under $100,000 to build the house.
And it took about 8 to 10 months to build pretty much.
I found Tiny House Block.
I found a spot here, so I decided to park it here.
Now I'm happy.
I have a house, I have a car, I have a job that I love to do,
and I have my dog and that's it.
Welcome to the tiny house.
Come on in.
So this is a living room.
As you can see, everything is white, and bright.
All the lighting is Philips hue lights.
So it's color and the white.
So you can just change the whole appearance of the house.
Everything is white.
So whatever color you play with. the house become that color.
You want to a pink house? There’s some pink wall for you.
And it works that way.
And also the major thing in the house is those doors,
those bi-fold doors that actually close.
So a lot of things here happen.
So we have this table here that transforms. It goes taller.
It also becomes four people table,
can put it outside, can have dinner on it.
Sometimes I put it here against this thing to be a desk.
This is the TV here
And from here, I had a fireplace installed,
which is like an ethanol fireplace, no odor.
So it's okay for indoor.
Be careful for the flame but it's just me and him
so we’re pretty safe. And just it light up. Put the fluid in and light it up. It’s good.
As you see here, this is like a sofa.
You have storage under here by pulling the pillow out.
He’ll probably stay here and see what happens.
Dexter, are you ready to go? C’mon.
So you can see here I have storage.
So the bed comes out like this.
Right here there’s levers. You just grab this, pull it.
It’s on hydraulics.
The bed won't hit the table because the legs are longer.
But see how it was done
like to the inch. Because this bar right here, look,
you just touch the fireplace, barely.
Goes down here
and this is the bed. Queen bed.
Pretty comfortable because you have a 13 feet high ceiling.
So it looks like you're in a big, real
big room when you're laying down.
And the AC unit right here,
the thing I hate about tiny home, or like,
mini split, is seeing this white unit. They’re just like, ugly.
You know?
So what I did was hid it behind a panel there so you don't see it.
That's it, simple.
Everything around the bed is used as cabinets.
So everything you see is storage.
And one thing, I feel like it's important to have in your house is like,
electric blinds. This will add the luxurious to your house somehow.
Just having those electric blinds to move down,
and just close everything down.
It's blackout.
So it gets dark inside.
Alright, that’s it for the living room. Now let’s go look at the kitchen.
First we’ll start with the countertop.
We have this, like, waterfall
drop that’s going on there.
So I’ve always liked this modern look. That’s what I’ve seen in every video
magazine that I've seen for, like mansion or like expensive homes.
They all have like, white countertop in this kind of style.
As you cam see there's no outlet unless you look closely here
it’s blocked up right here. So you push it, and you have three prong outlet here,
charge your phone or do whatever here, and hide it up.
So the goal is to be really minimalist and to put away
what you have already.
So all those cabinets here don't have handles because I don't like
the look of handles and I feel it's more slick when there's nothing.
But now you be like, you're going to say, “How do you open it?”
So each of them has a way to open. Most the time it will be on this side.
You just push the corner, it will just open up.
So with this house I decide
to go with this Kholer sink, that has compartment.
You have a cutting board that comes with it. All this comes with it.
You have like those things here.
So as you wash dishes, you can just let them actually dry then put them away.
And then we went with a matte black finish.
Everything is the same color.
This is a water filter here, connected to like reverse osmosis
get water from there.
And I have a real exhaust fan here.
So actually when you cook, everything goes out.
And with this setup I went with this induction top
because I like it’s easy to clean. So I just need to clean-
I can use it a few times.
And you can make a lot of meals, like anything you need.
So here we still have more pantry cabinets.
You know, there's like one, two, three, four shelves
you can put stuff in. It’s pretty deep, you have this much depth to put stuff
in pretty much. And here too,
so when I go in, actually when I come in the house, I come
to this one first with my jacket here, my hat here.
And so the cupboard behind here as well.
So when you come in here,
you have cabinet here for pantry that you stuff here.
This one you push, this opens up like this.
You have oven air fryer that does everything.
And they have more storage here,
and also here we have
the combo washer and dryer.
You just save more room.
Just having one unit to do everything, then having a stackable
and not having one.
So now is like you need to have everything you need in this house to be
to be like living in a regular apartment. And the fridge here.
So this fridge is so unique because it was really hard
to find a fridge that has the same
design. Meaning white and high gloss.
So I was able to find this brand, Bosch, that was able to make this fridge.
Which is a glass top and it's coated white. And it has a big fridge here.
Room for fridge. For Dexter’s carrot and green beans is always here.
And then you have a freezer for anything you can fit here.
So there's some room here that I use for storage, like I have
chairs that
I use for the table when I eat outside over there.
With two people, I have two of those chairs that folds.
And I just put them away easily here.
And at the end we have this big glass door that separates
the kitchen from the bathroom.
Big thick door that slides open.
So this is a bathroom
I have this big mirror too that has this light around it.
So that we can see everything, all the detail on your face it’s great for makeup.
I don't have male makeup, but for women, it's perfect.
And then we will move to this thing here.
When I use this thing
here, kind of combine the black from out there, kitchen and some chrome.
Something particular about the faucet is
you can spin the faucet and actually use as a fountain
to wash your face, wash your mouth- rinse your mouth.
So you don’t need the tap or anything else,
you just do that.
It's very, very simple, pretty neat.
I don’t know anybody that has that.
And then next we come to the toilets.
The toilet’s
probably the most expensive part of the house, almost.
It was like close to $5,000.
It came from Europe.
It is incinerator, toilet.
So pretty much what it does is it burns your poop. There's no water.
I went with this toilet because most toilet you're going to need a black water.
A black water tub as well
in your house. Which is heavier and more nasty.
That's why I don't want to deal with that.
So what I've done was get an incinerator toilet
which just burn your poop and then become ashes.
And when it's done you take it out from the tray here, put it out, empty outside.
There's no odor, no smell.
And the way it works is almost like a coffee filter.
So come here.
You take a filter,
You open it up
and you just slide in here.
Most composting toilet, I didn’t like was
you have to empty like every week, whatever it was. Like, I don't want to do that.
Deal with, like, poop you know? So that's why I got this.
It cost more money, but made more sense.
I went with a bathtub here. It has
some functionality as well. It’s a whirlpool.
So has multiple jets and lights. Light therapy as well.
And then right here, you can also see a rain shower
that is going to be falling down
the rain shower or the wand there.
And then moving along there’s storage here.
Plenty of storage in this house. as you open this cabinet here,
you’ll see storage here for like coats or whatever.
And behind this
panel actually, when we take everything out
this is where the utility room is. Where everything is, the electric
panels, the water gallon tank and everything is here.
So it’s all hidden.
That’s this side of the cabinet, and the other side is right here.
another storage here. We have drawers to
open up, to put your stuff, jackets.
So I feel like, more storage than most apartments sometime.
So right here is the control panel of the house
pretty much. This house was intended to be like a smart home.
You can have Alexa or whatever other stuff you use to control
the house and the lights. You can also do manually with the iPad that’s here.
So the iPad can control the blinds,
also, the lights are right here with the controller.
You have all your lighting system here
on this panel. And then we will go down here.
We have this thing here, which is the best door for Dexter.
So each time
I don't want to get up and open the door for him,
he needs to go out, just go by himself.
goes out and comes back in. And his bowl is here, that’s all he needs.
You also might say, “How you
get to the loft?” Right? There’s no ladder.
So that's the next part.
This ladder here is a telescopic ladder.
It's magnetic.
I come up here to do some work
sometime, I have my iMac and I can edit video.
You know, so there's a day bed here.
so you can just lay down and take a nap if you wanted to.
You know, up here is this nice
hairy, white soft fur here. That’s really comfortable to like, lay on.
So I also like those long windows up here that you can see everything
pretty much. All three angles. We have this door also here that opens to the rooftop.
You can just get out, straight out from here.
Alright, so we're now on the rooftop. On this rooftop
I decided to have, a rooftop deck because I want to be able to
use some more space using the top of the tiny house.
Most people usually do a roof that’s slanted because they worry about the water
being stuck or whatever, snow.
So I didn't care too much because I feel like such a small,
small width, only eight feet wide, that
I didn’t have any issues.
It's been six years that it has been built and no issue with the rain or leakage.
So it worked. Also, what I’ve done
was I had this welded actually, custom welded.
This railing
actually folds down, collapses down so that we can actually move the house.
And I can come here in the morning
as I wake up, do some stretches with some taichi, martial arts,
and then some yoga.
At the end I just meditate on this chair right here. This is a chair.
I just sit down and meditate for like 20 minute or whatever long
because when you're here you’re just with nature, you have all those trees
around you and everywhere you look, there's going to be trees.
So that's why I feel
this energy when you come up here, and that’s why I say this is my favorite
spot to be up here, up high.
The deck here is pretty important to the house too,
because I went with a design where you can actually remove the deck
to take with you.
This is the third time I moved the house and the deck still here.
And it still looks good.
You know? So the deck you can connect them to each other.
It's a system that allows you to raise the deck and make it lower. It is up to you.
So what I've done here was have it raised two feet high here
outside of the living room.
So we have this big space. And we did these slat
design here for privacy, you know, so to, uh, to get the sun out.
So when you come down here, the lower the lower deck, I call it.
So you have all this section here and I come here usually to work out.
I have all my my gear right here actually.
I have storage under the deck.
So go to the deck, I should have two feet high
so ten feet by 12 of storage underneath.
So all of this is storage.
So I have like dumbbells,
like workout gear.
So a chair here, another a chair to meditate. I love meditation.
You got to find the spot to meditate the right way.
Sometimes I come here and I can listen to the birds,
have a little fountain here that makes a little bit of sound.
I created a little Japanese garden.
in the back there, have a Muk Yan Chong, which is a wood dummy
that you use for martial art.
Here we have ladders like railing
that I did here to allow you to actually jump up here.
I made a longer bar here so I can go up there and do pullups.
So as you climb up here, you can go up and go to the roof as well.
Life shouldn’t be about going to work
and make money and pay rent.
I feel like I should be
finding something you love and and just go for it
and have fun.
And this is what I'm doing now,
because I couldn't find myself before because I was too stuck.
Now, I’m more free so I have time to actually find what I want to do, what I love.
Use your time to do creative things and be more into finding yourself.
It's mindful living.
intentional.
Everything has a purpose.
Thanks for watching this week's episode.
I hope you guys enjoyed it.
If you'd like to see more tours from this tiny house community,
we will have them linked in the description
and I will see you soon with another unique home tour.