Take a peek inside Ikea's first sustainable tiny home

Ikea has built a tiny home that's living large. Refreshingly the house doesn't skimp on style or amenities, and it has been designed with sustainability at its core.

The tiny house movement — typically dwellings smaller than 500 square-feet — has been surging in popularity for more than a decade, and increasingly so in the past year as travelers seek safe, remote and compact havens during the pandemic. Now Ikea is getting on board by designing and decorating a tiny house through the Ikea Tiny Home Project.

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The Swedish retailer partnered with Vox Creative and American RV and tiny home builder Escape to design a space-saving house with eco-friendly features. Escape built the trailer, which is a customized version of its Vista Boho XL model, designed with solar panels, composting toilets and on-demand heated water supply, powered by the trailer. Vox created a now-closed shoppable experience online, where audiences could explore the home, and buy furniture or gadgets to decorate their own tiny home or compact living space.

"It was a natural pairing," says Escape founder Dan Dobrowolski, who completed the build in less than 60 days. "We feature many Ikea products in our various tiny home designs around the country as they mirror the renewable, reusable, and recycled materials we incorporate into the actual structures."

Ikea senior interior design leader Abbey Stark designed the space as an Ikea show home, using sustainable, multifunctional, space-saving and energy-efficient products.

"How I started was really listing out all the needs for the space," Stark explained. "Like, how do you design around a wheel well and the mechanics of the home? I wanted to source renewable, reusable, and recycled materials when possible to make the space functional as well as beautiful."

The space is decorated in neutral tones with white-washed sustainably grown pine panelled interiors. Kitchen cupboards are made with recycled bottle tops and built-in storage and furniture. There's even a collapsible desk and table which functions as a workspace, ideal for digital nomads.

If you're interested in getting your own tiny home off the ground, the Ikea BOHO XL model from Escape starts from $47,550.

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