- Over the past decade, we've stayed
in hundreds of unique rental properties around the globe.
So we've partnered with Airbnb,
to create a series called, "Meet Your Host."
Their platform has seen tremendous success
for hosts of unique stays.
We'll be visiting these unique properties around the world
and hearing from the people who brought them to life.
(upbeat music)
Welcome to another episode of "Meet Your Host."
Today, I am in Ybor City, which is a neighborhood
in Tampa, Florida, where I'm meeting up with Stephanie.
Her and her husband, David have, not one,
but two tiny houses on Airbnb, and they designed them
and built them themselves, they got a little influence
from the shotgun shacks here in Ybor.
So I'm really excited to go in and actually take a look.
Let's go.
(upbeat music)
Hi, Stephanie. - Hello.
How are you, Kristen?
- Good, so nice to meet you.
- Very nice to meet you.
Thanks for coming. - Yeah, thank you.
Before we go inside,
which we will assume because it's quite active out here,
which I love, why tiny houses?
- Tiny houses. (claps)
So it didn't really start as a house,
I think that when David and I, my husband and I,
moved to New York,
obviously you're living in really tiny space,
and we realized how nice it was,
and kind of how freeing it was to live small,
so when we decided to build something here
to have as a winter place to escape,
we were, "Well, why not go tiny?"
It's nice to introduce like Americans to that concept,
because not everybody lives tiny.
- Absolutely, yeah.
We ourselves live tiny, so we know it very well,
and I'm really excited to explore this tiny house.
- [Stephanie] Cool.
- And we'll pop into the other one, as well.
- Awesome, cool. - All right.
Let's do it.
- Come on in.
(door squeaks)
(upbeat music)
- I love it, I love how bright it is.
- Cool, yeah, yeah.
It's bright enough, but like nice and shaded.
So in the summer when it's really hot.
(car horn beeps)
It doesn't get too, too warm.
So Ybor was kind of came up a couple centuries ago
as a place for cigar workers to come from Spain, from Cuba,
from Latin America.
So all of the cigar workers lived
in these tiny little shotgun shacks.
So we mimicked those kind of in a more modern way.
So that's how we got kind of like the form
and overall shape of these.
So a shotgun shack is a tiny house that is lined up
and laid out so that if you have the front door open
and the back door open, you can literally shoot a shotgun
through it, and it will go out from the front door,
out the back door.
So each room is behind the room in front of it.
So it's just like a row of rooms, if you will.
- We're in the living room now, which is really cozy.
- It's pretty self-explanatory.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I love the open concepts of tiny houses too, 'cause I just.
- [Stephanie] Yeah, I enjoy that myself.
- [Kristen] The kitchen's a nice size,
it's like a full sized kitchen.
- It is, it is.
Yeah, we've lived here for long periods of time
and it works just fine.
So we wanted it to be a full kitchen so that,
you could live here for long periods of time.
So we just went tiny with everything,
which in America is interesting because small appliances
actually are more expensive than big ones
because they're harder to find, the demand's not there.
So everything is kind of like European and one-off
and funky, but we like that.
You can cook a Thanksgiving meal in here and I have,
a couple of times.
- [Kristen] So you and your husband lived
in this tiny house?
- We did, we did.
We lived here for like six months, I think, yeah.
- [Kristen] And was that before you had the idea
of putting it up on Airbnb?
- No, no, that was after.
So we had to like wedge ourselves in the schedule.
(Kristen laughs)
To make it work, but luckily by the time we were in here,
we already had the house next door.
So we kind of like, let that be the Airbnb
while we were living in this one and figuring out
what our next project here in Tampa was gonna be.
- Well, okay, so let's go upstairs.
- [Stephanie] Cool.
- I want to see it, see the bedroom.
(upbeat music)
- [Stephanie] Front bedroom.
- [Kristen] Yep.
- Pretty easily explained,
super basic, but everything works.
And I think that feels pretty nice in here.
- Yeah, it's simple and clean and bright,
and this is a nice touch here.
- [Stephanie] Yeah.
(Kristen laughs)
Yeah, I like it, that was the most fun when
we were living here, it was like,
"Okay, which one of us is getting these?
- Yeah, right.
It's quiet in here though.
- Yeah.
- It is.
- Yeah.
- For a busy area.
- We tried because its, because it does get really loud,
especially like on the weekend nights,
you've got like cars going by with sounds systems
and hydraulics and people yelling,
and it's a very lively spot.
So we tried to keep it as quiet as possible in here.
(car engine hums)
(upbeat music)
- Bedroom number two.
(Stephanie claps)
This is bright, you got another like system over there
to hang up your clothes, are these cigars?
- Yeah, so we wanted to harken back to like
the history of the neighborhood, we love Ybor a lot.
We like to showcase all of the things that Ybor's known for,
so, cigar boxes, go down to our local cigar shop
and ask them for all of their extras,
so that they're easy to come by here, and they're beautiful.
I think they're all like colorful and interesting
and they're all different.
- Touches like that, I think really make a unique stay
in an Airbnb like memorable, right?
- [Stephanie] I agree.
- That's what people are going to comment on.
Like the little touches like that.
- [Stephanie] For sure.
- So this is the full bathroom that we have.
- [Kristen] Mm hmm.
- [Stephanie] All the goodies.
- [Kristen] That's a wide shower.
- Yeah, my husband's pretty tall.
I don't want anybody to like,
have to be taking a shower in a little mouse hole.
So we tried to make everything a pretty good size.
- I think we can go to the other house.
- Let's do it.
- See the difference between the two.
- [Stephanie] Yeah.
(upbeat music)
(door squeaks)
- Wow, nice.
- And this was our original tiny house that we built
in 2015, this was kind of our, I don't know,
trial and error, see what happens, see how it works,
play around with it.
- Was this the first tiny house that you ever built, ever?
- Yeah, yeah, this was like our, from scratch,
like having lived in New York,
we knew we wanted to build something small,
knew it wanted it to look like it was appropriate
for the neighborhood.
But this two together, actually worked on this with David
before we were even dating.
He was paying me to like kind of start to think about
the design and the site plan of this.
And then it went on hold for a few years.
We moved to New York.
And then we decided to build it.
- Love the library.
I'm a big fan of libraries.
- [Stephanie] Little baby libraries.
- So are these books too that you've just read yourself
and you want to share?
- [Stephanie] Yeah.
- [Kristen] Share with everyone?
- [Stephanie] Totally.
- I'm digging this New York City map behind here.
- [Stephanie] Yeah, I mean, homage, we have to represent
New York because even though we were not there
at the moment, like that feels like home for us, so.
- [Kristen] It's also a part of your journey.
- Totally.
- [Kristen] Building this house right?
- 100%, yeah, I think we learned so many lessons
living in 300 square foot apartments in New York
that you don't usually learn living in Florida
because you don't have to live in such a small space.
- I'd love to know too
about the more technical parts about this.
- Sure, so that's the fun and nerdy part for me
as an architect.
So we built both of these tiny houses using SIPs panels,
which are structural insulated panels.
So they're basically 26 gauge metal
with a styrofoam sandwich in between.
So it goes together kind of modularly, it's almost prefab.
Everything comes together, so floor, walls, roof,
all SIPs panels.
So you get them onsite, you cut them to the length
that you need.
You bolt them all together and you have the whole envelope,
ready to go in a couple of days, which is really nice.
And it keeps things really cool and pretty quiet.
Plumbing wise, the houses are raised up off the ground,
so it's pretty simple.
Everything runs under the house and up to where we need it.
So this is a historical district.
So we had to get like historic committee approval
to build these, and people had a hard time
wrapping their heads around building something so small,
they just, they couldn't get it.
They were like, "Well, why don't you just build
a normal three bedroom house?"
And we're like, "No, like we don't want to do that."
This is, this is the fun part.
- [Kristen] Yeah.
- Like let us do this thing and now that they're built
people get it, but it was a learning and teaching process
for everyone.
- [Kristen] How long did it take you
to build this first house?
- It took us probably about six months to build,
because we were in New York.
We had a contractor friend who was kind of doing most of it,
but we still wanted to be here for large parts of it,
to kind of manage, and, we were doing a lot of design build,
we hadn't figured out all of the details ahead of time.
So we wanted to be here as things were taking shape,
to make sure they looked like what we wanted them
to look like, being architects, we were pretty picky
about a lot of things.
We did not take the easy road by far.
So we had a lot of lessons learned, but, it was fun.
And the cool thing about both of these is
that they are built in such a way that we can
cut the foundation systems off and move them
if we ever want to.
- Nice.
- So in that respect, it is kind of like a little bit
of a traditional tiny house and that they're movable-ish.
My husband and I being architects,
we knew that we wanted to build these the way
that we wanted them at which was definitely not
the cheapest or easiest way to build any part of these.
So I think on a per square foot basis,
both of these were a little over $200 a square foot,
which when people hear that they kind of freak out,
but it costs more to build small,
because if you think about it, if you have a plumber
or an electrician come out, they're still plumbing
or wiring the same amount of fixtures.
So even though the square footage is less,
it's the same amount of work for most of the trades,
but we would do it the same again.
And we will in the future, 'cause we just,
we think it looks right, it looks appropriate
and that's fun, that's fun for us.
(upbeat music)
We initially put this house on Airbnb just to see
if it could pay for itself, and that was going to be,
all we needed, and we've been pleasantly surprised
with the fact that it does spit out some income
and that income we can turn around.
So we took the income from this house,
we turned it around and put it toward the second house.
And so it's just kind of like a moving, moving,
fluidity of money to like funnel into other things.
So it's been good.
Because the first one was so successful,
that's why we decided to build the second one so quickly.
We thought we would take a little more time,
but we ended up not.
And I think the success that we've had with these houses
has allowed us to continue to do small development projects,
which is really what we love to do.
Living here while we were building next door,
this is not a full kitchen,
so we had to adapt this house to be a little better
for long-term living, so that was our pantry,
so we installed those shelves after the fact,
and we were just kind of like, "Okay,
how can we make this work for people who are going
to be here for six months instead of two days."
- Right.
- And most people who are staying here don't cook much.
Either you walk two blocks and you have any type of food
you could possibly want.
- And this is another full size bathroom.
- [Stephanie] Totally, so yeah, exactly the same layout
as the bathroom next door, big shower, sink, toilet,
all the stuff you might need.
- And we're right beside, one of like, a busier road,
but it's actually pretty, pretty quiet in here.
- [Stephanie] Yeah, it's not bad.
(upbeat music)
We planted these a couple of years ago
and they started off about this big and they've grown
to be taller than a house already.
It looks a little silly cause everything's shoved up
against the house, but since we are planning
to put the third house here, sometime soon,
we didn't want to have to move things around again.
So we were trying to landscape knowing
that we would build something else in the future.
Luckily, Ybor is super urban in its zoning regulations.
So nowhere else in Florida or Tampa, for sure,
could you build something so small legally
because it's just tough.
Like people have like minimum square footages
for their houses, they have minimum lot sizes,
but here we don't have that.
So it's nice to just be able to build tiny as of right,
that's really rare.
(upbeat music)
My husband and I are both big travelers,
we traveled independently before we met each other
and now we travel together, but we just, we used Airbnb.
So it was kind of an easy decision to go with them.
It was a platform that we already knew as guests,
so it seemed very intuitive.
And thankfully we've learned that it is pretty intuitive
for hosts, so it was just an easy decision.
We didn't put a ton of thought into it.
Once we put this up on Airbnb,
we realized that there weren't very many Airbnbs in Tampa
and especially in this neighborhood at all at the time
in 2015, so our popularity (snaps)
kind of took off pretty quickly,
especially given the novelty of the house itself.
When I first started hosting,
I had a full-time job in New York,
in the corporate world and I had a lot going on.
And so I was a little nervous
about just the time requirement needed for hosting,
but it's been super easy.
I've found that even for introvert like myself,
I really, really love the interactions with guests.
Like people, I love answering questions.
Our tagline for the house is that "Every guest
can be a local," so we love providing everyone with,
our personal recommendations for the neighborhood.
My husband's born and raised here,
so he knows everything and everyone.
Ybor is a really unique neighborhood
because it is a historic district.
It's the entertainment district.
It's really close to downtown.
It's really close to the cruise port.
It's really close to the convention center.
So we get such a wide variety of guests.
You have the 20 year olds who are coming
for a hip hop concert.
You have the 70 year olds who are leaving on a cruise
and just want to come to Tampa
for a couple of days beforehand.
The demand is huge for, for both houses.
And sometimes people like can't choose which one
they want to stay in.
So we have repeat guests and they literally,
one time they'll stay in one and then they'll come
to the other one and they hop back and forth.
The favorite pieces of feedback that we get is,
people are like, "I just want to go home."
And home for them means these houses,
they're out having fun in Ybor,
and they're like, "Let's go home."
(upbeat music)
- Listing their tiny houses on Airbnb has given
Stephanie and David so many opportunities.
This is definitely only the beginning for them,
and what they're planning to do here in Ybor.