An Aerodynamic Tiny House Design

One of the benefits of a manufactured travel trailer over a typical owner-built tiny house is improved mobility. This is due to the fact that most tiny houses are built like houses making them heavier and less aerodynamic than their manufactured cousins. While these traits often make tiny houses more desirable and comfortable for full-time living I often wonder if there’s a way to also have mobility too.

There are a couple of obvious work-arounds for lightening-up tiny houses. The best I’ve seen is by building the walls with lightweight structural insulated panels, like the Tiny SIP House, or this variation of the Sonoma Shanty. The design could also be made a bit more aerodynamic, whch is what I’ve tried to show here. I realize that this house is still not terribly aerodynamic, but it’s probably a lot slicker than most traditional tiny house designs.

It’s designed to be built on top of a 20-foot flatbed trailer. It has a small porch so you can find your keys without standing in the rain. Just inside the front door is a small bathroom on the left and a floor-to-ceiling built-in cabinet on the right. Just past the small entry hallway the room opens up into a small kitchen on the left with a shallow counter on the right.

A sleeping loft is above the bathroom, entry hallway and kitchen. The main room is open to the high ceiling. The steep roof over the living room has two venting skylights that serve as windows. Above the living room and loft are two more skylights. The high ceiling combined with the multiple skylights should give this tiny space an open feeling.

The living room is mostly filled with a built-in L-shaped sofa bed. Inside the sofa would be space for storage. A couple pieces of plywood could be used to temporarily fill in the open space in front of the sofa to form a large bed. But even without filling in the open space two people could sleep head-to-head or foot-to-foot on that big sofa. The cushions would simply be specially cut foam inside zippered covers.

If you like playing with SketchUp drawings you can download the original file here. I’m also still experimenting with the Podium V2 photo realistic plugin, so there are some items (lights, textures, components) that come with the trial version of Podium V2 included in the drawing. If you don’t have the plugin you might not see all the items when you open the SketchUp file.

I do plan to offer framing plans of this sometime in the near future – but no ETA at the moment.

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