The Cȃpsula collection by Netherlands studio i29 features three black cabins with radically indoor/outdoor options.
Welcome to Tiny Home Profiles, an interview series with people pushing the limits of living small. From space-saving hacks to flexible floor plans, here’s what they say makes for the best tiny homes on the planet. Know of a builder we should talk to? Reach out.
Founded in 2002, Amsterdam studio i29 architects initially focused on bringing its minimalist aesthetic to projects in the hospitality, residential, retail, public, and office domains. More recently, the team has set its sights on creating tiny homes meant to be easily added to a property. “[The Netherlands] has a real need for flexible design options with a small footprint,” say i29’s founders.
The new collection, called Cȃpsula, features three cabins ranging from 107 to 538 square feet. Each structure bears the same key elements: lightweight materials, a neutral color palette that includes an all-black wood exterior, and a simple layout that’s meant to blur the boundaries between the indoors and out. Here, the firm’s founding partners, Jeroen Dellensen, Jaspar Jansen, and Chris Collaris, share how they created the collection.
At just more than 500 square feet, the Patio Home is the largest of the Cȃpsula trio. It sleeps four, has a kitchen and bathroom, and is equipped with a combination of sliding doors and large windows.
What’s the most exciting project you’ve realized to date?
The first series of tiny homes have already been installed at a beautiful location in The Netherlands, and people can book a stay in one by contacting us if they want to try them out.
What does your base model cost and what does that pricing include?
We have three different models:
The Writer’s Block Hut is 107 square feet and starts at €24,500 ($27,986.89 USD)
Soft Lodge is 270 square feet and starts at €98,000 ($111,947.54 USD)
Patio Home is 538 square feet and starts at €195,000 ($222,738.75 USD)
These prices don’t include taxes, transport costs, screw pile foundations, interior fit outs, site preparation, or installation. There’s also additional fees for panelized forms to fit into a shipping container for worldwide shipping. All base models include the facades you see here. These prices also exclude options such as a skylight in the bathroom, an outdoor bed, or additional windows.
The Writer’s Block Hut is a tiny, timber-clad retreat designed to comfortably sleep one.
From the Agent: “Big Sky Ranch is a 320-acre equestrian community perched above the Pacific Ocean in southern Nicaragua, where solar-powered homes rest on breezy ridgelines with panoramic views. Horseback trails wind through open pastureland, leading to some of the region’s most untouched surf beaches. With generously sized lots and thoughtful land planning, privacy comes naturally. The ranch is part of the local community of Escamequita—an emerging area known for organic farming, yoga retreats, and creative living. For those seeking privacy, connection, and a slower, off-grid lifestyle, Casa G&G is a standout—offering contemporary design with soul in a place where nature takes the lead.”
Blue van Doorninck
The off-grid home is powered by solar energy and a backup generator.
How coastal fog, Taliesin West, and burgeoning beat culture helped the experimental Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice pioneer his own school of anthropomorphic regionalism.
As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s July/August 2004 issue.
Eighty-three-year-old architect Mark Mills is as free-spirited and prickly today as he was when he and kindred spirit Paolo Soleri were banished from Taliesin West in 1947. “Frank Lloyd Wright got the idea we were stealing his clients and he said, “Scram!” recalls Mills, who now lives in Carmel, California, where he still practices architecture. “Paolo and I were thrown out at the same time,” Mills continues, describing how the two young architects found their way to a desert hideout on the north slope of Camelback Mountain near Scottsdale, Arizona.
Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they lived in the open among the sagebrush and cactus for the next year. “We were living up with the squirrels,” says Mills. “We scrounged dates from the date trees and then the skunks came along. The skunks sprayed on the dates and we ate skunk dates.”
Their encampment consisted of little more than a tent, but eventually they built a more permanent shelter. “It was a little demonstration cone with a hexagonal base made from concrete block and a roof made from triangular pieces of plywood,” explains Mills, who has had a passion for hands-on building since childhood.
Mills and Soleri’s exile on Camelback Mountain had all the elements of biblical legend: fleeing society, breaking ranks with the deity-like Wright, living with the animals in a desert wilderness, taking time for reflection, and returning to the world with a visionary message. Soleri would sit quietly on a rock and draw imaginary structures by stenciling ephemeral veils of watercolor onto paper. “It was the landscape that penetrated my semi-impermeable wrapper,” observed Soleri. Then, in 1948, the outlaw architects came down from their mountain and rustled up a client.
Photo by Julius Shulman (Dome)
Nora Wood hired Mills and Soleri to design a small desert getaway in Cave Creek, Arizona. For a little extra, they agreed to build the structure themselves. “We told her that if she bought us $300 worth of tools, we would go out and build her house and she agreed,” recalls Mills.
The concept for the house was based on a drawing by Soleri called “Turnsole,” which depicted a domed structure embedded in the desert floor. Its glass roof could rotate to follow the sun’s path across the sky. “The idea was already in Paolo’s head,” says Mills. “And when Paolo got an idea, it didn’t leave his head until he had built it.” Mills is characteristically humble about his contribution to the project. “I mainly did the grunt work,” he says. “I couldn’t change any of Paolo’s ideas so I just grunted.”
The pair excavated the entire foundation by hand, using only shovels, pickaxes, and an old wheelbarrow. Mills and Soleri got occasional help from the client’s attractive daughter, Colly (whom Soleri moved in with soon after).
While it’s easy to see Wright’s imprint, the Dome House suggests a more personal and sensual interpretation of Wright’s “organic design”: a one-to-one communion with nature; a place for reflection and personal transformation. At once a cave, spiderweb, and sky dome, the house combines eclectic influences from the Southwest, like Native American kivas, with an offbeat kind of sci-fi imagery. (The region was experiencing a high level of UFO sightings at the time.)
Such anomalous sensibilities—outer space and back-to-the-land—would be reconciled in the alternative architecture of the 1960s, helped along in part by the cosmic parity provided by LSD. The Dome House was published in Architectural Forum in 1961 and, along with R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes and Friedrich Kiesler’s Endless House, became a touchstone for young designers wishing to break from the soul-withering grid of corporate modernism. Mills and Soleri were, in a sense, proto-hippie architects, two of the pioneering fathers of the hands-on, design/build movement that swept North America in the following decade.
Photos courtesy of Mark Mills (Color Interior & Exterior), Julius Shulman (B/W Interior)
After finishing work on the Dome House, Soleri went back to his native Italy—he would return to Arizona in 1956 and start the alternative communities of Cosanti and Arcosanti—while Mills moved west to California and settled in Carmel. The Big Sur area was already established as a bohemian outpost. Henry Miller was there and so was Ansel Adams, along with a colorful mix of artists, poets, vegetarians, and back-to-nature eccentrics. Miller used to come to dinner regularly at the house of Mills’s mother-in-law, Louisa Jenkins, a mosaic artist who, Mills remembers, “used to stand on her head naked.” It was in this setting of fog and beatnik glory that Mills established his own independent practice and designed a series of more than 30 one-of-a-kind houses for an equally free-spirited group of clients.
One of Mills’s first projects was for Nathaniel Owings, a partner in the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who needed a place to escape his high-pressure career. He bought a property in Big Sur where the rocky outcroppings of the Santa Lucia mountain range cascade into the Pacific Ocean. “We wanted to build a house that would become part of this rugged shoreline,” Mills recalls. “Our aim was to disturb as little as possible.” They chose to position the house on a seemingly unbuildable precipice that dropped 600 feet into the ocean. “We fitted the house into the windswept line of bay trees, which were clustered on the extreme end of the point,” said Owings in 1961. Two-thirds of the structure was cantilevered out over the cliffside. The Owings family chose an appropriately poetic name, Wild Bird, for their aerie.
It was such an intimidating, windswept site that Mills made the entry sequence low and cavelike so as to embrace the visitor upon arrival. A narrow footpath leads down terraced stone steps and between rough, rustic rubble walls. This tight, subterranean effect is a preparation for the explosion of panoramic views that follow.
While the sloping roof of Wild Bird was meant to evoke an elemental sense of shelter, the Farrar House (1966) was more suggestive of living. biomorphic forms. The site for Far-A-Way (a play on the client’s name) was as sea-washed as the Owings’ site, but even closer to the ocean’s fury, nestled in among the jagged rocks of the Carmel shoreline. Mills designed it to be as tough as a barnacle, with 9.5-inch-thick steel-reinforced concrete walls that sloped outward at a slight angle and gave the structure a bunker-like profile. Odd, trapezoidal windows and doors added further to the pillbox effect. “If there is another war,” said Betty Farrar in 1967, “I suppose we can just knock out the windows and stick some big guns in.” Every opening offered close-up views of ocean and rocky shore.
Photos by Ezra Stoller/Esto (Owings), courtesy of Mark Mills (Farrar)
