Napier couple Francois and Sarah-Lee Guittenit live in their tiny house with their three children. It measures just 7m x 3m. Photo / Supplied
Napier couple Francois and Sarah-Lee Guittenit live in their tiny house with their three children. It measures just 7m x 3m. Photo / Supplied
A new book lifts the roof on the people who live in tiny homes.
It's written by former Spartacus gladiator and host of international YouTube show about the phenomenon, Bryce Langston.
The 34-year-old from Auckland's North Shore and partner Rasa Pescud, 27, a former pilates instructor from Hamilton, spend two to four months on the road at a time filming episodes around the world.
They've profiled homes throughout New Zealand, Japan, Australia, USA and Canada. Europe is on the agenda next year.
Home for the couple is Langston's newly-finished tiny house parked on a permaculture property at Waimauku, near a pirate ship treehouse which features in his new book.
The material cost for his own 6.6m-long, 4.2m-high, 2.5m-wide tiny house was around $60,000 including off-grid technology.
The book, in stores nationwide from Wednesday, features more than 50 tiny houses, and their owners, from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, the United States and Canada.
It features Napier couple Francois and Sarah-Lee Guittenit who manage to live in their tiny house with their three children. It measures just 7m x 3m.
Bryce Langston is the face of the tiny house movement and has written the book "Living Big in a tiny House". Photo / NZ Herald
It also features a biologist and director of a gibbon conservation centre who moved her tiny home on to the site so she could always be near the apes, as well as a couple who built a pirate ship treehouse, complete with mast, compass and rum.
At 193cm,Langston admits he is "perhaps the last person you would expect to live in a tiny house".
"The tiny house movement is really becoming popular in all the areas where people are finding the affordability of housing just getting out of control," said Langston, whose YouTube channel has almost one million subscribers.
"I've seen it go from a very fringe concept to something that is definitely now what I would consider to be a mainstream concept."
The Bachelor of Communications graduate from Auckland University of Technology is a musician, filmmaker and actor, including playing bad-boy character Ashton Fuller on Shortland Street and a gladiator on Spartacus: Blood and Sand.
But as he points out in his book, he found there was "an unfortunate disconnect between doing what came naturally to me and earning money".
"It's a home that I can own outright without any debt, which means that instead of needing to worry how to find money for rent (or a mortgage) every single week, I can actually focus on doing things in life that I'm passionate about."
The Hundred Hands Cottage in NZ (Scarlette) from the book Living Big in a Tiny House by Bryce Langston. Photo / Supplied
Funding from YouTube advertising supplemented by sponsorship aligned to his show, Living Big In A Tiny House, which is the same name as his book, means he now has financially stability, Langston said.
The average tiny house price in New Zealand is about $50,000-100,000.
"I've seen them built here in New Zealand, if you recycle all the materials and you're doing all of the labour yourself ... for under $20,000."
An environmentalist and minimalist, Langston is able to travel with "pretty much everything" he has - clothes, filmmaking equipment, and a guitar.
Unity Wagon in Yandoit, Victoria, Australia. Even though this tiny home is compact it provides the owner with all his needs. Photo / Supplied
"We're taught in life to be consumers and to value ourselves based on the things that we purchase. But… we gain so much more innate value from our experiences in life and the relationships that we nurture."
>> Living Big in a Tiny House, By Bryce Langston, (Potton & Burton RRP $49.99)
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