Check out that view

I’ll come clean about something: I’m claustrophobic. Not severely, but enough that enclosed spaces make me restless in a way I can’t quite will away. You might wonder what draws a person like that to tiny homes. I’ve wondered the same thing. But I think the answer is windows — and the philosophy behind them.

A tiny home without thoughtful windows is a box. A small box at that. And there is nothing charming about a small box, nothing aspirational, nothing that makes you want to linger over a second cup of coffee. The thing that makes the difference is windows.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have a particular relationship with the outdoors that gets complicated in winter. The rain, the gray, the low light — these are not inconveniences to be endured, they’re part of the texture of life here. A rainy afternoon can be genuinely atmospheric, even beautiful, but only if you’re positioned to experience it rather than just be subjected to it. The difference is a good window.

When I imagine someone living in one of our homes, the scene I keep coming back to is this: a cup of coffee, the custom hardwood table folded out, the rain doing something interesting on the glass, and a person sitting there with their thoughts — or their laptop, which amounts to the same thing in the best moments. The eyes wander. They find the middle distance. Something shifts. That’s what a window does that a wall cannot.

Up in the sleeping loft, we’ve thought about this too. Rolling over in the morning and immediately confronting a ceiling is a certain kind of experience. Rolling over and finding a window — a tree, the light doing whatever it’s doing that day, a patch of sky — is another kind entirely. The day announces itself differently when you can actually survey it before you’re vertical.

We use the phrase “bringing the outside in” and I know it risks sounding like something from a real estate brochure. But there’s a real idea underneath it. In a small space, the psychological boundary between interior and exterior matters more than it does in a large one. A well-placed window doesn’t just let in light. It extends the perceived space outward, borrows the landscape, makes the inside feel like it belongs to something larger than its own four walls.

The Pacifica has eleven windows. We placed them with this in mind.

Mount Baker Tiny Homes builds custom tiny homes on wheels and van conversions in Bellingham, Washington. Get in touch if you’d like to talk through a build.