With housing costs on the rise, the idea of owning a home can feel like a fairytale. 

But New Zealand couple James and Leonie have found a way to thrive in a sustainable tiny home and food forest without breaking the bank.

In a new episode of Living Big in a Tiny House, the duo shared the story of their 22-by-8-foot home.

Before building their tiny house in the subtropical north side of New Zealand, the couple lived in a van while traveling, followed by a house truck, and later, a small studio. It was here that they started drafting up their own build, inspired by so many tiny home creators online.

“We started with zero savings,” James said. “We were like ‘let’s do this, you know? We’ve got, like a hundred bucks in our bank, what can we do?’ So we started saving and working towards that.”

In addition to saving up, the pair sourced plenty of secondhand materials to create their dream tiny home, starting with all of their windows.

“It’s a great place to start, when you’re doing a lot of recycled and secondhand stuff, with windows,” James said. “Even being secondhand, they’re not particularly cheap … but we’re trying to keep it as eco and sustainable as possible.”

The frame of the home is crafted with timber and integrates thoughtful spatial design to maintain a sense of minimalism inside the house. And even the flooring panels were purchased from Facebook Marketplace.

“We really always like to live quite minimal, not having many things,” Leonie said. “Living in a van first really taught us to not have much. Like, I moved here with a 10-kilogram backpack. That’s how much I took. And we just realized we didn’t need much.”

While their material possessions may be limited, the richness this couple has can be found in the small-scale syntropic food forest that surrounds their home.

Syntropic agroforestry is an agriculture system that mimics natural ecosystems, which in turn produces abundant food while restoring soil health and biodiversity. 

James and Leonie got lucky with their situation, setting up shop on land that their friend already owned. Instead of paying rent, they provide “land hours,” and steward the land in exchange for living on it.

“He really likes us to also be part of the land,” Leonie said. “We get to just build food forests and gardens and make it our space as well … It fits us well because we quite enjoy the work.”

James has even taken on syntropic forestry as a business to help others plan and implement their own food forest gardens. 

“It’s creating resilient food systems that [are] not only producing an abundance of food, but also regenerating the land,” James explained. “We are utilizing the power of some of these more weedy pioneer species like eucalypt and acacias to really send their roots down, break up the soil, and create organic matter.”

“We’re using lots of support species to … feed the system and create a fully regenerative system,” he added.

While the syntropic system makes a self-sustaining ecosystem, the couple also integrates annual permaculture plantings to round out their sustainable food production. With all of these methods at play, they can harvest food — from tomatoes and corn to berries and pumpkins — almost daily. 

The food forest is a key part of the living arrangement, with a tent set up for visitors, and now a source of income for James.

“One of the things I love about syntropic agroforestry is it’s this wonderful collaboration between humans and nature,” he said. “Together, joining forces, we can accomplish in 10 years what nature might take 100 to do on its own.”

In addition to the food forest, the home is completely off-grid, utilizing solar panels, a compost toilet, and an innovative rain collection and watering system that cycles water from the home back into the garden.

“The shower runs straight off into the banana circle,” James said, pointing to a bed of bright green plants. “All of it eventually ends up in the banana circle, feeding that and helping grow … those thirsty plants.”

Even with all of these features in mind, the couple estimates they spent about $34,000 USD total to bring their dream home to life — a figure that pales in comparison to the average cost of $520,000 USD for a traditional home in New Zealand.

And James and Leonie have no regrets.

“We designed it to our own needs. The tiny home means freedom,” Leonie said. “I find that there’s not many overheads for us, we can live a very simple life, and I don’t have much stress.” 

“It really feels like home,” James added, “because we’ve created a space that we love being in.”

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Header image courtesy of Living Big In A Tiny House