Today AD brings you to Beverly, Washington along the banks of the Columbia River to visit a tiny home straight out of the early Space Age.
When professional catamaran designer Kurt Hughes decided to build his Lunar Lander Dwelling House, he set out to improve upon the excessive weight and structural weaknesses found in some tiny homes.
Using lessons learned from his decades building ships, Kurt has maximized every inch in his meticulously designed replica of the Apollo Lunar Lander.
- Those are QR codes for the two websitesfor the Spaceship Project.So when I'm not here andpeople come by and go,what the hell is that, then they can justwalk up with their phoneand get the answer.[upbeat music]Welcome to the LunarLander Dwelling House.We're in Beverly, Washington,on the Columbia Riverin the Columbia Basin,it's a desert part of Washington state.My lunar lander's a replicaof the Apollo lunar landerthat went to the moon inthe late 60s, early 70s.One of the connections was the astronautstrained some 50 miles downstream.I decided to build this lunar landerbecause I've been buildingthings pretty much all my life.When I was 21 or 22 I built a dome.When I was in college Ibuilt my first sailboat.When tiny homes started becoming a thingI noticed that they had several problems.They were heavy, theywere structurally weak.I'm a catamaran designer and I thoughtthe same technologies could applyto make a better tiny house.The first thing I didwas to do a 3D model,then I could pull off patterns.And from those patterns I cut pieces out,vacuum bagged them together,brought them over here,and then used epoxy toglue them all together.I'm Kurt Hughes, this is myproof of concept prototypeof a tiny house built like a catamaran.When people first come in herethey see Captain Nemo's window,just like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.The idea was to haveit an open environment.It's nice to be able to come in,look out the window, watch the river.And then right below it is thetable from my first sailboatthat got repurposed here.The lights are controlled bybuttons, like on this one here.Then I can sit down on thecomfortable epoxy foam seats.These holes in the chairs save weight,it's kind of an aerospace thing.And that's sort of aphilosophical statementof the whole building.You'll notice there's a lot of NASA here,NASA's a good model forefficient spacecraft.Antigravity pads overhead, incase the gravity disappears.Off to the left thereis the weather centerso we can see what's actuallyhappening outside there.And then here might bethe only set of stampedengineered plans of a lunarlander house that there is.Here's one sheet forexample, with the elevations,and those are pulled off of the 3D model.This is what I would do to a boat design.[jazzy music]Okay, the next thing would be the sink,which is actually like a telescope mirror.It picks up the lightsin the sunlight hereand focuses it to acertain place right there,which is something I never expected.A nice surprise.These are plumbing fixtures thatI've converted to light controls.Here's the bathroom.It's a Japanese Toto Wahan toiletthat I wanted to see the mechanisms for,so I bolted it right to the wall.And it ends up with a tankthat's only three inches deep,which in a tiny housesaves a lot of space.Over there is the toilet paper holder.On the floor is a glow in the dark powderso that at night theentire floor is glowinglike the Milky Way, so youcan see where you're going.And the shower has different light colorsfor the temperature of the water.So when the water is cold it's blue,as it warms up it's green,and when you get to 45degrees Celsius it's red.There's my compact boatbathroom on a house.[dynamic music]Okay, next we look at the front door.The door opens with fingertip biometrics.And then it's interesting,look how thick it is.It insulates, R-15, mostdoors are R-2 or R-3.So it's got a huge amount more insulation.But then that requireda recessed door handle.So that added another week ofconstruction time right there.But it had to be just right.Okay, this is the kitchen,or galley as we call in on a boat.And one of the interesting thingsis my carbon fiber countertop.Range hood, makes it legal with the code.Here's the sink, microwave,refrigerator, drawers for storage.Here's a 3D model of the lunar landerthat my daughter created for me.And it's the same 3D modelthat I used to build the plans.Most important thing that the boat designdoes to help the kitchenis the moisture control.This is all epoxy.And so you don't need a backsplashbecause the epoxy does it anyway.Up overhead is the domethat lets the light in.And that way at night I cansit here and look at the starswhen the lights are off.It's all steel with plexiglass panels.It was a final element study to havemore than enough strengthfor any snow load.The lighting going around the upper partof the ceiling there,so I wanted to be ableto change the colors.But also they're all wrappedwith three quarter ouncespinnaker cloth from a sailboat.And so it has a Japanese lantern feel.Now the original lunarlander didn't have a deck.I wanted to have a way to be able to seethis beautiful scenery.So you sit out here in theevening, couple chairs,have a drink, look atthe river, it's great.So originally this wasgonna be a lounging pit,but the building department declaredit had to have seven foot headroomso it got a lot deeper, andthen that became the bedroom.Okay, let's go down and havea look at the downstairs.So we're downstairs now.This is the bed, this is the ship's ladderthat we just came down on.The floor is all Ethafoamlike a wrestling mat,so that you can fallcomfortably if you fall.Six of the closets here.And then there's some lights here.So right down there is a planetariumand it projects up on the ceiling.I feel like I'm traveling through spacewhen I have the planetariumon and I'm looking at it.I wanted to use boat windows downstairs.The problem was the building departmentwouldn't allow it unless I took outthe plastic standard boat windowsand replaced them with double-paneargon filled e-coating widows.And now we'll go takea look at the outside.Here we're in the outside ofthe lunar lander dwelling.It's got some unusual features.It's not on the ground,it's off the ground.There's concrete pads at theend of each of the steel legs.A neighbor across thestreet happened to havea plasma cutter and hecut out my railings.How cool is that?And he cut out the stair stringers.These structural legs areactually an improvement overthe original lunar lander,they had four legs,which is a unstable configuration.This has three, which is much more stable.You'll notice there's a hold down cableslike we do rigging on a sailboat.And that's what's important to keepa very light structure weighing aboutjust over a ton, keep it in one place.There's glow pebbles on the walkwayso you can see whereyou're walking at night.And then there's solar powered footlightsthat light up the steps all night long.So these are storagebins for outside storageand inside storage on the inside.There's never enoughstorage in a tiny house,so I wanted to makesure we had a lot of it.This has become my favoriteplace in the world.It's fun, it's interesting,and it keeps me thinking.It's just a beautifulplace to get away to.