Tiny House Hotel in Portland, Oregon

$125 per night, includes wi-fi. Click here.

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

5 Responses to Tiny House Hotel in Portland, Oregon

  1. they say it's the only tiny house hotel in the country, but this is not true. I live in portland and if you go on airbnb.com you'll find at least a few if not several tiny houses you can rent nightly– for less than this hotel charges. I should know, I have one!

  2. Northern Lights,

    There's a big difference between 'vacation rentals' and a hotel. A hotel is a commercially run, licensed, permitted, inspected, tax-paying operation.

    Vacation rentals don't necessarily address any of those regulatory hurdles, nor are they necessarily legal under current municipal legal frameworks. http://portlandtribune.com/pt/9-news/125888-house-rentals-hide-in-shadows

    Don't get me wrong; we in total support of vacation rentals, but I just want to spell out the significant difference between the two types of entities.

  3. Just to follow up on this issue a bit more…you can't imagine how many times we had to describe what we were proposing to various department staff. It was very time consuming and full of bureaucratic hoops because the City of Portland hadn't ever dealt with anything like this before.

    We had to work with the City, County, and State departments for over a year to get the permission to build and operate this business.

    It's great that you have a tiny house for rent in Portland through Airbnb. Come by Caravan and tell us more about it. We're having our Grand Opening on Saturday, July 27th, 5-10pm.

  4. Hi Kol,
    Thanks for your input. I don't understand fully why a hotel would be more desirable than a vacation rental, or why you would go through over a year of bureaucratic cow pies when you could do otherwise, but I respect your business and I am all for every type of tiny housing co-existing.

  5. northern lights,

    That's a fair question. After wading through so much bureaucracy, I've also pondered over what advantage the hotel confers over a vacation rental. The short answer is, to the guest, generally speaking, not much. Like I said, we're fans of vacation rentals.

    But, in this particular instance, there's a few palpable advantages:

    1) Because we're a legal commercial operation, we're connected to the city sewer and water, which makes for a more accessible guest experience in terms of trying out tiny house living.

    2) We're raising awareness about tiny house living to a much broader audience that may not ever consider using VRBO or AirBnb but would consider staying in something called a 'hotel'. No vacation rentals can ever call themselves a hotel.

    3) Lastly, by being 'legitimate' in terms of being permitted, we can fully publicize our venue in the public eye in a way that vacation rentals would not be able to do nor want to do for fear that they may get shut down.

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