Welcome to the Mouse House

From Stewart Little to The Wind in the Willows to the swashbuckling mice in the Redwall series of children's novels, people have long been amused by the image of tiny mice living the high life in tiny homes stuffed to the rafters with anthropomorphic niceties.
This playful fantasy has taken literary form in various cultures – French, Russian, British, Spanish, Italian and German, just to name a few. But the mouse house featured in this photo essay was built by accomplished designers and builders in Boise, Idaho, who simply keep a mouse's sense of adventure at heart, while building tiny homes for real-life humans, who may want to live large by downsizing the domicile.
Advertisement
This particular Mouse House Tiny Homes model, which can be parked just about anywhere, looks as much at home in the country as it does in a downtown neighborhood – or even in suburbia. It is modern, but modest, sophisticated, but simple. Let's tour this delightful home and see what you think.
You can see part of the staircase on the right, which is doing double time as a series of rising drawers and storage cubicles. The highest step is the top of the closet on the right. Meanwhile, the sliding door (with the mirror) is common in tiny homes, where a swinging door would collide with items that might be in close proximity.
This downstairs room doesn't feel cramped, when it has two comfortable chairs and a plant on a table in between them. Plants help give any indoor space an unhurried atmosphere.
This house has two lofts. Below is the storage loft. The unpainted look of the beams holding up the loft is a great look that contrasts well with the white background.
Looking above, that's a four burner stove with an oven, an extremely rare item for a tiny house.
This bedroom loft is very mousy -- and spacious thanks to the extended second floor the builders incorporated into the design.
Below, you can see the designers were brave enough to have the bottom step of the staircase actually turn towards the center of the room. That's a design coup. Most designers would just have the stairs extend along the wall almost apologetically.
With the extra tall ceiling in the middle of this house, you can enjoy the pleasures of a full-sized ceiling fan.
Appliances where you can reach them are common features in a tiny house. For one, there's no basement in which to hide a furnace. But a decision to downsize your need for stuff means that the stuff you do have becomes all the more critical. This heater is an example of that. 
These close up views show you how much care was put into construction of this home. The iron cupboard knobs are an example of getting the commonly overlooked details right.
Advertisement