Welcome to Tiny House Living.

I’m Michael Janzen. I am a designer, an artist, and a lifelong advocate for the beauty and utility of living small.

If you followed the early days of the tiny house movement, you might already know my work. Between 2008 and 2019, I ran a busy tiny house design blog focused on packing maximum utility into the smallest possible footprints. But my fascination with tiny spaces started long before that.

The Mendocino Roots

I was born in Mendocino County and grew up just south of there. In the early 1990s, right after college, I moved into my grandmother’s tiny cabin in Redwood Valley. I renovated that cabin, built a tiny house-sized pottery studio, and spent my days working as a potter.

Those years spent in a small space, surrounded by the architecture of historic coastal towns with the memory of the masted sailing ships and timber history, left a permanent mark on me. When I began designing tiny houses in 2008, I named my designs after those towns—places like Westport, Caspar, Albion, and Philo.

For me, designing tiny homes has always been about the puzzle. It is the ultimate challenge of optimizing space and creating multimodal living environments. My goal was never just to draw architectural blueprints, but to create step-by-step assembly instructions that demystified the construction process for regular people building their own dreams.

The Hiatus and the Return

In 2019, I stepped back from publishing tiny house plans to focus on my tech day job, though I never stopped designing, writing, and making art by night.

Now, in 2026, I am returning to the tiny house design studio with renewed energy and a fresh set of ideas.

What’s Next for Tiny House Living

As I open this new chapter, my design focus is shifting toward Modern and Mid-Century Modern aesthetics. I am also exploring new ways to solve the spatial challenges of tiny living:

• Wider Footprints: All my new tiny house designs will be released in pairs, offering both standard 8.5-foot road widths and 10-foot wide versions of the same house design.
• Small Foundations: I am limiting all future fixed-foundation designs to 500 square feet or less, the scale of my grandmother’s cabin which was 450 square feet.
• Extreme Challenges: I’ll be exploring unconventional concepts just for the fun of it—like how to build on a cliff face, a mountain top, or in an arid desert.
• The Process: I will be re-launching my YouTube channel to document the “how” and “why” behind the designs, including my experiments with 3D printing physical models.

I’m a maker at heart, and I am thrilled to share this next evolution of Tiny House Living with you. Whether you are planning a build, or simply love the ingenuity of small spaces, I’m glad you’re here.

Warmly,

Michael Janzen