QuadPlex Mobile: Four Tiny Homes On One Trailer

The tiny home phenomenon has been growing every year for the last several decades. Perhaps its first advocate was Henry David Thoreau who built a tiny home on his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson's property on Walden Pond. Now so far, and understandably, tiny homes have tended to be individual undertakings, one-offs built by and for the tiny home owner. Commercial builders have lately entered the market and there are even offerings from HomeDepot and Tesla. Great to see - but one is still faced with the logistics of getting the house from the manufacturing plant to the home site - and faced with outfitting the home site with electrical, water, and sewer. Now tiny home communities have sprung up but the results for the most part are short on aesthetics. In particular they lack the crucial quality identified by anthropologist Jay Appleton as 'Prospect and Refuge'. The tiny home community tends to blindly reproduce the lay out found in the mobile home park. Units are set up one next to another - or in some cases in a 'circle the wagons' arrangement. Either way there is precious little privacy, rather ramshackle outdoor living areas, and ad hoc extra storage often in the form of little sheds scattered here and there.

I think the mobile home industry is in the best position to produce a well designed and inexpensive tiny home for the tiny home community. I propose four tiny homes be put on a single trailer chassis of around 74 feet long, 18 feet wide. In this way there is an economy of scale - only one structure need be built which provides four separate homes - and only one moving and setup operation is required rather than four separate ones:

The 'quadplex' 4 in 1 tiny home shown above solves the economy of scale problem. But to really make the tiny home mainstream, the tiny home suburban development problem must be solved. To that end I propose that each tiny home come with its own private tiny courtyard to include integrated storage, lounge and dinette, and two parking places. In the design shown below, each unit has a mini split HVAC, an on demand hot water heater (placed above the toilet), and a stacked washer and dryer.