Every tiny house we've walked through, ours and other people's, teaches the same lesson: at this size, there is nowhere for a bad decision to hide. A mediocre choice of tile in a normal house disappears into a hallway you pass through twice a day. In twenty-two square meters, it's the first thing you see when you open your eyes. So before a single wall went up, we spent months arguing, mostly with ourselves, about what actually deserved a place in these walls.
Wood won almost every argument. Not because it's trendy, but because it ages the way we wanted the whole experience to age: slowly, and better with time. We're building with local pine and spruce wherever the supply chain allows it, finished with oils rather than the hard lacquers that make new wood look expensive and old wood look tired. A cabin should be allowed to show its years the way a good pair of boots does.
What lost the argument, mostly, was anything that asked for a manual. No smart thermostats deciding the temperature for you, no lighting system that needs an app before it turns on. Vibe Village is meant to be the place you stop optimizing your life and start living inside it for a weekend, and a house full of settings menus works against that on the first evening you're too tired to configure anything.
The bathrooms took the longest, which surprised no one who's ever built anything small. A shower that feels generous in twenty-two square meters is an engineering problem disguised as a design one, and we went through four different layouts before landing on one that doesn't make you choose between elbow room and a proper rain showerhead. It's a detail nobody will ever mention to us directly, and the one we're proudest of anyway.
The view got the final word on everything else. Every window in every cabin is placed after the site is chosen, not before, walking the actual plot at sunrise and sunset to find the one angle worth building a wall of glass around. It's slower than working from a standard floor plan. It's also the difference between a house with a window and a window with a house wrapped around it, which is closer to what we're actually selling.
None of this is finished. Prototypes are still being adjusted, and a few of the choices above will probably look naive to us in a year. But that's the nature of building something this deliberate: you get it mostly right, live in it, and let the small house teach you what it still needs. We'll keep writing these notes as it does.
