Watching: Healing in Clever Microhome Atop Tiny Food Forest

At just 8 square meters (86 square feet), the Freeland tiny house extends far beyond its footprint with a large deck, a wood-burning sauna, a Win Hof method ice bath, and a permaculture food forest providing enough produce for a family of four.

Builder Antoine Grillon of Serena Tiny House says it’s the tiniest home he’s ever built, but it’s also the most high end. The bathroom has a heated towel rack, a rainwater shower and a sleek stainless steel composting toilet that slides out when needed and that can convert to a squat toilet (Noah is originally from Iraq). The kitchen is equipped with high-end – albeit compact – appliances and the huge windows use hydraulic tech borrowed from the car industry for easy opening and closing.

Permaculture designer Aline Van Moerbeke of La Casa Integral helped Noah design a food forest adapted to the dry and rocky soil. Since the property is small and water is in short supply (the tiny house roof is too small for much water capture), everything is planted with food or medicinals. Much of the food is planted in raised beds in order to build the soil (composting is being done on site) and for easier access to the plants. The garden is designed using companion planting and stacking functions to take advantage of the tight space.

“Permaculture often gets mistaken for permanent agriculture as a limited concept, only agriculture,” explains Van Moerbeke, “But what we are aiming at is to design ecosystems as a whole and not just our food production so if we’re saying we want to have at least 10% or 20% of our own living system a productive system then that means that we want to be moving away from a consumer system so we need to also change our economy, we need to change our behavior, so we want to be changing the use of resources that may or may not be available in our ecosystem so I’m talking about water or sun.”

Kirsten Dirksen, https://faircompanies.com

Serena Freeland House: https://freeland.serena.house/

La Casa Integral (permaculture): https://lacasaintegral.org/

Quotes/Highlights

Antoine Grillon of Serena Tiny House

• Normally, you adapt to a house, when you enter into a house or to a flat you adapt to a space; you adapt to what you have. You adapt to a space; you adapt to what you have. That’s the opposite. The environment is adapting to the needs. And you’re adapting yourself as well to the environment because you rely on the environment to be able to live. And depending on the lifestyle depending on what’s going to happen to the future who’s going to be living there doesn’t have to be one answer or one fits all.
• It’s all about the long term vision of it as well. As you make sure that if you build something that’s gonna last, but at the same time that you can easily fix it and replace parts and one particular to it as well.
• It’s way more than a tiny house. The idea is to create a center for self sufficiency and excellence in terms of how do you increase the life expectancy using natural methods
• That’s about getting rid of things you don’t need, and focusing on what really matters to you being in terms of relationship in terms of what you eat, where you live, where you drink, where you sleep, all of that.

Permaculture designer Aline Van Moerbeke of La Casa Integral

• You can have an edible landscape and not have too much of an impact because this is what we see from a permaculture perspective. The originators back in the day they were also looking at the ancestral tribes in their surrounding and seeing how they actually live their role in The ecosystem and not take too much. but actually they’re taking is also beneficial for the landscape.
• Yeah, and did we don’t want to be losing out on beauty because we also want to have the mental benefits here. ..It’s like often people feel like when we have to live the permaculture lifestyle, we have to sacrifice. And we think that sacrifice is a no go word, we’re just going to be co living with everything. And even if it doesn’t have immediate edibility, we can still see its beauty. Because it is creating soil, it is creating the space for wildlife.
• The idea is gradually changing what was to what can be. So seeing the potential of a place, but not maybe immediately going in RARR and trying to work with nature. And step by step, feel what the place wants to be and can be.
• Permaculture often gets mistaken for permanent agriculture as a limited concept only agriculture. But what we are aiming at is to design ecosystems as a whole, and not just our food production. So we want to be changing the use of resources that may or may not be available in our ecosystem. So now I’m talking about water, or sun.
• “Permaculture often gets mistaken for permanent agriculture as a limited concept, only agriculture,” explains Van Moerbeke, “But what we are aiming at is to design ecosystems as a whole and not just our food production so if we’re saying we want to have at least 10% or 20% of our own living system a productive system then that means that we want to be moving away from a consumer system so we need to also change our economy, we need to change our behavior, so we want to be changing the use of resources that may or may not be available in our ecosystem so I’m talking about water or sun.”