Continental demonstration house

Eco Tiny House · 2023 · structural, fabrication design

An oversized tiny house full of heavy furniture, equipment and building services. Continental had it built to show its surface materials and took it to exhibitions. It was made for show: overcomplicated and unusable as a home — no heating, cooling or ventilation.

Together with Eco Tiny House we turned it into a working building. We designed not only the structure but the connections and the technical solutions: the air-conditioning unit, for example, sits outside the thermal envelope, concealed, ventilated and without a thermal bridge.

It later turned out that the manufacturer had given the equipment weights inaccurately: the structure carried roughly one and a half times its design load. And when it was lifted, the specified lifting points were not used. The roughly 900-kilogram steel frame survived that too, undamaged — while the finished, furnished building weighed 13 tonnes, more than fourteen times the frame’s self-weight.