Mawer Spaces | Small & Tiny Home Design

I’m Elli. From the very beginning I have loved and been obsessed with homes, houses, building design, smart storage, and architecture from around the world.

At age seven I was partitioning my bed to make homes for my soft toys and turning our bunkbeds into an apartment block. I loved the Sylvanian Families narrowboat, not because I used it for imaginative play, but because it had so many amazing, sneaky, ingenious storage solutions. My favourite museum to visit as a child was Bristol, because it held a beautiful traveller’s wagon: small, perfectly formed, entirely self-contained.

Add a few years, and I was designing kitchens and bathrooms for paying clients while spending my free time designing full homes for fun. I marvelled over 3000-year-old depictions of buildings in Valcamonica and wondered how they relate to modern vernacular architecture in the region. I studied reconstructed lake dwellings in Unteruhldingen. I travelled the world visiting and living in traditional dwellings, from mediaeval fortresses in France to felted gers in Mongolia, getting the feel for how each reacts to its environment and how its users interact with building, landscape, and climate.

Then a full BSc in Building Surveying, covering everything from contract law to designing housing estates, historic building techniques to U-values. I received a First overall and a quite honestly ridiculous 98% for my dissertation: thousands of words, many thermal images, and a great deal of data on mud as a building material, its thermal properties, and what traditional buildings can teach us about resilience in the face of climate change. All the while still designing houses for myself, for fun.

Since then: multiple house moves, time living in a converted van, and more travel visiting buildings and homes around the world. My copy of the Metric Handbook of Planning and Design Data is a precious possession. I am a building and construction geek with plenty of DIY experience, and one of my genuine superpowers is condensing a family’s increasing clutter into the same space, over and over again.

This is where that creativity, knowledge, experience, and geekery go to work. If you are thinking seriously about living smaller, you are in the right place.