This year we celebrate TinyFindy’s 5th anniversary, a good reason to ask some enthusiastic TinyFindy participants about their experiences in the Tiny House market and their expectations for the future.
‘Liberté Tiny Houses was founded in July 2017,’ says the passionate Tiny House pioneer Gijsbert Schutten, ‘During the construction of our own Tiny House in 2016 and 2017, we received a lot of attention and reactions and we were also regularly asked whether we would like to help others to build. I come from all-round renovation, but for a long time I had the desire to do something that really makes a difference for the customers, where you can combine creativity and innovation with craftsmanship and something that you can preferably make in the workshop. At Tiny House construction everything comes together and that is why I founded Liberté together with my good friend Gijs, with whom I had already worked on many projects.’
The partners have started building the classic, small Tiny Houses on wheels: ‘We build these less and less these days, at most as cabins for recreational use. The trend is that the Tiny Houses are becoming larger, within transport dimensions, and are also increasingly being built in accordance with the Building Decree (permanent structures). Prices have also risen sharply in recent years. Where you used to be able to have something built for € 50,000 to € 60,000, that is no longer possible today.’
Gijsbert looks back on an exciting and instructive period since the start of the company: ‘Our foreign projects are the icing on the cake. There are houses of ours in Scotland, Belgium, Sweden and Germany, all brought and placed ourselves.’
There have of course also been challenges, such as developing a system to link houses and determining how you can respond to the rapidly changing market, deal with the rising material prices, and think about how to grow as a company in a natural way without losing your soul. But he notes with due pride that the work is especially fun: ‘In Amersfoort, for example, we are involved in a Tiny House project as a project leader at the municipality. We do the design and construction.’
Liberté provides all services related to Tiny House: Design, permit processes, construction, installation, service and maintenance: ‘And within these disciplines we specialize in customization.’
The enthusiastic Tiny House builders still see a few points for improvement for the future: ‘We are seeing more and more regulation from municipalities. There are actually no more projects that you can go to without a permit application. We sincerely hope that there will be a clear policy. Now almost every municipality has its own rules. And that makes it unnecessarily complicated for both residents and for us as builders.’
Very slowly they also see opportunities for financing by banks: ‘Banks are rigid and conservative, but they are moving a bit. We naturally welcome this, because it offers many more people the opportunity to have a Tiny House built. After all, it is an investment that you make for your life, you can have your house designed and built to last for life, always take it with you and it is a sustainable and circular product.’
Gijsbert also sees a trend from regular construction: ‘There is an increasing demand for prefab homes with standard dimensions and often standard layouts and materials. We cannot compete with large companies that offer such a fixed product, but we can also play a major role here in the field of customization, such as prefab expansion, installed in 1 day, and modular homes.’
See the listing page of Liberté Tiny Houses on TinyFindy:
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