The Most SPACIOUS TINY HOUSE You Will Ever See
Abel Zyl, the founder of Zyl Vardos, is a tiny house builder based in Olympia Washington. He's currently working on his 24th tiny house. He works with a crew of four to six carpenters that he refers to as ‘mechanical geniuses’ in his workshop. The tiny houses he builds start typically as a sketch. When he feels happy with the balance of the form and the design he takes it to the 3D model stage then he brings in his other designer, friend, and carpenter. He works with him to get all the parts and pieces made in the model and fit together so that they have a working model. From that point on it's just a matter of organizing the project into small two-person crews that tackle various parts like framing the walls, building the roof structure, creating the windows, and hanging them properly in the house.
He often builds the utility systems himself then the house goes on to his favorite stage, which is long-winded but really fun because that's where they bring in the woods that they've been curating and they create trims and curve pieces that go around the windows. They install cabinetry and flooring and tiles. It is these whimsical curves and other design choices that make the products coming out of Zyl Vardos so distinct. Then when the house is really close to completion, there is this testing and check off phase. This is something he’s gotten a lot better at as he’s gained experience, it’s where he gets to hone how everything functions together. He really enjoys that part of the building process.
One of his most recent creations is the Damselfly House. It's got a 10-foot by 24-foot floor plan, so it's pretty big. One of his favorite parts about this exterior is the entry door. This is Zyl Plank Door, which is a very heavy laminated build up of marine plywood and then wood planks. It has a damselfly wing inlay of contrasting wood that ties into the roofline of the house which is kind of unique. He’s been wanting to do a double curved roof line for a while, which is where it curves upward and then downward again, or concave convex. He used the on de'via roof as it handles curves really well, which is where it's at for roofing for him.
The Damselfly House has a lot of windows which is what makes it so bright and airy inside. Like all of their projects, they hand-built all of the windows in the workshop. One feature that Abel insisted on doing despite the limited budget was this gorgeous window box in the kitchen. It really does a fantastic job of bringing the outside into the living space.
Damselfly has a pretty good-sized bathroom because it's a ten-foot-wide floor plan. You enter the bathroom through this Shoji door that he hand-built, which has an acrylic diffused filler so it'll last a lot longer than conventional Shoji paper. Right above the bathroom is a small sleeping loft, but it could also be a small space for a desk as it has pretty good headroom. He designed these stairs specifically for this house to incorporate storage. Most of the steps are drawers while the lower set of steps are removable and hide the hot water heater.
There's a sizable kitchen in the Damselfly House. Going over from the kitchen there's a flat-screen television, which is on an articulating bracket, so you can either remove it out of the way if you don't want it in the kitchen area or you can aim it at the bed or the couch. There's a bed platform at the end so you can sleep on the main floor without having to climb stairs or a ladder. There's some of his storage underneath the bed, and not far from it is another small couch with a side table. You could also put a dining table and a couple of chairs in there if you wanted or you could put up pop up tables and eat from the couch. It is a flexible space where you could do whatever you want with it.
He thinks that 10-foot width is what makes it feel more open than usual, but they’ve also been designing to keep the floor low and the top of the peak high so there's a lot of vertical space in there as well. It's really tricky but fun to try to transcend the box limitations of a tiny house that's meant to move on wheels, so by adding dimensionality to it he’s been able to open up the space more than usual.
He's been building small living spaces for 10 years now and he thinks one of the most important things he’s learned about building them is that it's important to find the right people to work with. That makes all the difference. It's really difficult to find good people to have in your crew, but it's also like one of the most rewarding things when you have a great crew. Over the 10 years he’s been building, one of the most important features that a small space can have seems to be flexibility. It seems like people enjoy their spaces the most when they can reconfigure it from time to time. He thinks the best advice he’s been given in his time building, which has been almost 25 years, is to not sweat the small stuff.
If you take that original pipedream of an idea you had for a project, and cut it in half you'll end up with something that's much more manageable. That's especially true if you haven't built something like that before or you don't have the experience to approach a project like that. Keep your dreams, keep your huge idea, but build it in small increments, and don't get yourself into too much debt. That'll give you the freedom to do what you want and go the directions you need to in order to make a living doing what you love.
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