Tiny House Vacations: The Next Mini-Trend in Travel

A tiny house vacation comes with some bonuses. By sharing a 150- to 300-square-foot space for a weekend, you quickly find out if you and your significant other are truly compatible, you sample life without the clutter of things beyond the basics, and you may even save money on your lodging fees.

Booking a tiny house for a getaway may be the next mini-trend in vacations, especially for twentysomethings.

Tiny House Village debuts Memorial Day Weekend with five dwellings that serve as an addition to the Mt. Hood Village Resort, a recreational vehicle park, in Welches, OR, an hour from Portland.

“Mt. Hood Village anticipates that the tiny houses will be of particular interest to adventurous millennials looking to explore the Pacific Northwest,” says spokesperson Jennifer Ludovice. The village’s offerings range from 175 to 261-square feet and come with bathrooms, two-burner stoves and loft beds. Tiny House Village offers guests gorgeous scenery from $129 per night.

Getaway also offers woodsy or otherwise natural, soul-saving locales but ups the excitement by not telling renters of exact location until the day before the trip. The website states “We started Getaway to be the first ever startup that helps you get out of the city. By doing our best to provide you with everything you need to break from routine, our goal is to help you hike your way back to balance.” Getaway offers three 160-square-foot houses in the Boston area that rent for $99 a night. Soon the company will offer three properties in New York.

HGTV’s show, “Tiny Houses, Big Living” showcases these life-size dollhouses. On the television show couples or singles purchase a dwelling and live happily in something that is basically the size of a walk-in closet.

If you’re interested in downsizing, a weekend in a tiny house may convince you that you can do more with less or you may run home, flopping onto your over-sized and over-stuffed couch with new-found joy.

To make renting a mini-dwelling easy, several vacation sites organize their mini-dwellings into separate listings. HomeAway’s offerings include a cottage with a porch in Colorado Springs, CO, and a beachfront bungalow in Point Roberts, Washington. Airbnb offers an off-the-grid cabin in Gasquet, California, and a hand-crafted gypsy wagon in Seattle, Washington. Tiny House Vacations, a site devoted to small lodgings, offers a house truck in New Zealand and a cottage in Northport, Alabama.

If after your vacation, you can’t live without your new tiny love, then contact a tiny house builder such as Gateway or Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, the contractors who built the Mt. Hood Village dwellings.