Tiny Away’s tiny houses allow guests to immerse in nature while enjoying comfortable accommodation. Verve sat down with Tiny Away founder, Jeff Yeo, for a tiny chat.
How did you first come up with the idea for your company?
In 2017 my friend and cofounder Adrian Chia was holidaying along the Great Ocean, swapping the grind of Singapore city life for a tranquil, rural setting. Back in Singapore, together with another friend Dave Ng, we realised there was a huge opportunity to use tiny houses to help rural and regional landowners open up their beautiful natural surrounds to city dwellers keen to escape.
From the start, our vision was to build a sustainable tourism business that both changes and challenges the holiday accommodation landscape. Our tiny houses are beautifully designed and set in stunning locations, but what sets us apart – and what we feel has driven a lot of our success – is our network of local landowners who make a Tiny Away stay so unique.
Tiny Away guests can expect to wake up – and go to bed – in style, before having the chance to engage in a variety of activities offered by landowner hosts, like farm tours, horse riding, bushwalking, wine tastings and quad biking. All activities promise to put guests a million miles from their hectic city life.
How does a Tiny Away experience tick the eco-friendly tourism boxes?
Our ethos is centred around reducing resource consumption and environmental impact. We know that tiny houses are an eco-friendlier alternative to traditionally constructed accommodation settings. Our houses feature waterless compost toilets, rainwater collection tanks for showers, and solar panels. One of the most important objectives of our tiny home escapes is to invite visitors who share our ethos of travelling more sustainably while experiencing remote natural regions and their local communities.
Small rooms and structures require far less energy and fewer materials to build, while the non-permanency of the accommodation structures is designed to preserve the land they inhabit. The homes require less energy to keep guests warm in winter and cool in summer, and the minimalist interiors help minimise our impact on the planet overall.
Small accommodation options like our tiny houses can help us entice more people out of the cities to experience and connect with the natural wonders of their country while treading lightly on the natural ecosystems and communities they visit.
Our ethos is centred around reducing resource consumption and environmental impact.
Is Tiny Away a family holiday or more a romantic getaway?
Both. Some of our houses are equipped with an extra sofa bed for the little ones. Other houses are just fit for a couple. What better way to get truly and unavoidably up close and personal than to spend a night or two in a tiny house?!
Whoever it is, the minimalist tiny house holiday is different to other holidays. Taking only the bare minimum of material possessions on a break is sometimes harder than it seems. But once people learn this new way of holidaying, like anything, they quickly adapt.
We’re proud to say that some of our houses are truly remote, and mobile reception on many of our properties is poor, so you have a great excuse to disconnect and spend time exploring the property and surrounding regions – but make sure you come prepared with all the essentials.
Tell us more about becoming a Tiny Away host.
The ‘social enterprise’ model within which we work with landowners means hosts become their own micro hoteliers, hosting tiny houses on their privately-owned land, maintaining the houses, and hosting guests – all while sharing a cut of the earned revenue.
Interest in hosting a Tiny Away house continues to grow in New Zealand. The first step has been to canvass regions that lend themselves to a Tiny Away stay – close to a major city but far enough away to give our guests a true ‘escape to nature’ – and then begin to recruit host landowners through a rigorous site assessment process.
As we know, many rural landowners across the country are feeling the financial legacy and impact of recent weather events – and tiny house hosting offers them a way to generate income by putting their land to an alternative use.
To book a Tiny Away escape, head to tinyaway.com
