Newlywed Grad Students’ Tiny House

Newlywed grad students, Emilio and Krysten, live in a plant and book-filled tiny house. It offers a satisfying simple living sanctuary as they work towards literary PHDs.  Every area of their tiny house includes books. They act as decor, inspiration, and practical studying needs. In fact, they have an entire storage loft dedicated to book storage reading. Emilio and Krysten also enjoy being silly sometimes by reading to each other through the metal tube handrail on the stairs. It creates a cool distorted sound like an old radio. As Emilio shares, their minimalist style lets the tiny house be the art.

Emilio and Krysten’s tiny home is the only long-term rental at Cranmore Meadows. Their lot rent is paid in part as a work/trade arrangement helping with the community development. So it currently only comes to $250 per month, offering affordable housing for these low-earning grad students.

On their first date, at that time, Emilio’s tiny house, the small space and community magic, helped their love story blossom. They married last summer. Since then, Krysten has been slowly downsizing belongings in her existing home. So she currently lives part-time with Emilio, a nontraditional way to begin a marriage but something that has worked beautifully for them both.

“We’ve also been intentional about how we want to be as a unit. In the decision to get married, we want to be married in a way that feels genuine to us and doesn’t fit some kind of standard that we’re trying to meet. So part of that was having our own spaces and having places to go if we need space.

It’s interesting because we have all of these houses that look the same and are not built very well, yet we continue to build them. And this kind of rhymes with the way that we see marriage. A lot of people expect you to be married in a particular kind of way, or these are the only ways you can be married and follow the same kinds of models, which is kind of like the same kind of homes.”

-Emilio and Krysten