Plana House is a modest but carefully considered 42-square-meter (450 square feet) affordable tiny home that was designed to be economical, straightforward to construct and generous in the ways that matter. The designer, Plana Architecture in Switzerland, also made the plan open source so anyone can download it for free.
“Today, house building has become increasingly specialized, expensive and removed from the people it ultimately serves,” the firm says. “Plana House begins with a desire to reconnect the design of a home with the people who make and inhabit it.”
Plana House has a compact plan that brings together the essential elements of a home, but the designer gave it careful attention to light, proportion, material and the relationship between the interior and outdoor. The intention, the firm says, is to explore how a small house can offer a considered and enjoyable way of living without relying on unnecessary complexity or expensive construction.
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The firm designed the house around materials, components and construction methods that are familiar and readily available. Its timber structure can be supported on screw piles or simple concrete pad foundations, allowing it to sit lightly on the land and adapt to different sites. Standard off-the-shelf materials and uncomplicated construction methods make it accessible to local contractors, small teams, or individuals with appropriate practical support.
The exterior is deliberately open to interpretation, allowing different materials and finishes to respond to local climate, landscape, availability and character, the firm says.
Plana says the project grew from a personal desire to work within a very different set of conditions. After several years working on high-end projects, where generous resources and exceptional materials allow for considerable design freedom, Plana House became an opportunity to impose constraints deliberately, the design firm says. The challenge was not to see how small or inexpensive a house could become, but to explore what can be achieved when affordability, simplicity and buildability are treated as fundamental design considerations from the beginning.
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The project is an ongoing experiment rather than a finished product, the firm explains. By making the design freely available, the project is intended to remain open to adaptation, feedback, and ideas from the people who engage with it. Over time, it can evolve through different interpretations, materials, sites, and ways of building, with the possibility of developing into a more detailed step-by-step guide as the project continues to develop. In this way, Plana House can continue to evolve through the people who study it, adapt it, and ultimately make it their own.
“Plana House is not intended to be a universal house or a finished solution,” Plana says. “It is a starting point that can be adapted to different people, places and circumstances. The drawings are shared freely so that the design can be studied, modified, developed with local professionals, or built. By making the design itself available, the project allows others to understand the decisions behind it and use them as a basis for developing their own interpretation.”
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