Furniture giant IKEA, together with Vox Creative and tiny house builder Escape, make a tiny house on wheels that reduces your footprint. “It was a natural marriage,” according to Escape founder Dan Dobrowolski. “We feature a lot of IKEA products in our tiny house designs, as they reflect the renewable, reusable and recycled materials we incorporate into the actual projects.”
According to IKEA, the aim of the project is to demonstrate “that anyone, anywhere can live a more sustainable life”. So the IKEA Tiny Home project has been created with that purpose in mind.
The entire trailer is a 17 square metre model filled with IKEA furniture, covered with photovoltaic solar panels on the roof and fitted with an on-demand RV water heater.
Everything in this house runs on electricity and allows autonomous off-grid living. It emits zero pollutant emissions, in fact, the only emissions come from the vehicle we tow it with. The interior panelling is made from sustainably grown pine, while the kitchen cabinets are made from recycled bottle caps. There is also a compostable toilet and a folding kitchen table/desk. Abbey Stark, head of interior design at IKEA, says she prioritised renewable, reusable and recycled materials to make the space “as functional as it is beautiful”. Stark designed the space as an IKEA home with sustainable, multifunctional, space- and energy-saving products. The entire construction took less than 60 days to complete and the price of these models start at $47,550. If the tiny house trend becomes even more popular through new sustainable projects like IKEA’s, it could help curb climate pollution from the housing industry. Currently for example, the sector accounts for around 5% of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, not counting electricity. “We built a sustainable tiny house from scratch to better educate and inspire consumers to bring sustainability into their own lives,” according to IKEA. The company hopes the project will “raise awareness and illustrate the big impact that small, everyday decisions can have for a better, more sustainable world”.
