Transitioning to tiny living and downsizing in general always entail a higher degree of compromising. It's the figurative price you pay for affordability, mobility, and sustainability and it's supposed to be well worth it. But that's not to say you can't find ways to work around it.
The recent spike in popularity for tiny homes has brought more variety to a niche of the market that had been, until then, under-served and underdeveloped. Today, if you're interested in making the big switch to this trendy and potentially profitable lifestyle, you can choose anything from the most extreme take on it to the most lavish.
In much simpler words, you can go as tiny as you want or as big as you want while still being able to claim you've downsized. The Whidbey falls in the latter category.
The Whidbey, by its full name the Whidbey USA Park Model, is one of the most recent models offered by Canadian builder Mint Tiny House Company. As the name clearly shows, it's a model tailor-made for the North American client, specifically that person who wants to go down a level or two but not lose the feeling of living in a proper home.
Photo: Mint Tiny House Company
Park tinies are the bigger, burlier, and more sophisticated siblings of traditional tiny homes. They're also younger, having been born out of modern requirements for comfort, luxury amenities, and the need to entertain. By offering more space to fit in all these fancy features, they gain volume and lose mobility because they're built on top of longer and wider trailers. In turn, this means that they can only be moved around with special permits, and if possible, not at all once they're delivered to their final destination.
The Whidbey is an excellent example of all this. Initially introduced in November 2023 via renders, it's now a formal addition to the Mint Tiny House Company lineup, as construction on the first model has been completed. It's a tiny house by the loose definition of a home on a trailer, but it lives like a mini-mansion on wheels.
The Whidbey sits on a 44-foot (13.4-meter) long trailer chassis with four axles and offers a living space of 33 feet (10 meters) in length and 12 feet (3.65 meters) in width because the remainder of the trailer length is taken up by a terrace that doubles as summer kitchen slash BBQ space. In 400 square feet (37 square meters) of space, the Whidbey fits in two bedrooms and no less than three lofts, along with a residential-like kitchen, a generously sized living room, and a proper bathroom.
Photo: Mint Tiny House Company
The builder says that the home can comfortably sleep four people, but it could occasionally accommodate as many as six or seven, with certain arrangements made on the spot. Add an extra deck to the built-in terrace, and you can turn this home on wheels into the perfect entertaining space.
Given its size, it's no wonder that the Whidbey is able to offer all the creature comforts of a traditional home and even pack in some you wouldn't find in a city apartment. This also means that it offers features you'd be hard-pressed to find in other tinies, even park models.
These include a fireplace in the living room, a bathtub shower in the bathroom (though it seems that the first built unit has ditched the tub in favor of a standing shower), a bedroom on the ground floor with standing height, a sleeping loft that also offers standing height through its entire length, and ample storage options.
Photo: Mint Tiny House Company
The layout is also slightly different that what most builders use for this length. The living room and the bedroom are located at each end of the trailer, with the kitchen, the bathroom, and the lofts sandwiched in between these two. Lofts in the plural, that's not a typo.
Over the bathroom and the main bedroom, Mint Tiny House Company has built two lofts that can be used in whichever way the owners see fit. In this completed unit, they're styled as a secondary bedroom and a mini-lounge, divided by a wall with shelving. The former is accessible via the storage-integrating staircase, and the latter via a removable library ladder. The same ladder offers access to the third, even smaller loft over the fridge and cabinets, which can be used solely for storage.
The Whidbey comes with RV-style hookup for water, electricity, and storage, and a 12,000 BTU single-zone mini-split for cooling and heating. It can be bought as a move-in-ready unit with everything but the clothes in the wardrobes or as an empty house the owner will furnish according to their taste.
Photo: Mint Tiny House Company
Since the Whidbey proposes a type of downsizing that's at the opposite pole of the extreme variant made possible by single- or dual-axle tinies, it's priced in sharp contrast to them as well. An empty Whidbey unit starts at US$163,247/ CAD 225,000, while a furnished one starts at US$181,734/CAD 247,741, before options like the fireplace, a laundry station, or custom finishes.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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