If you’re living in a tiny house, odds are that you have an abundance of space, privacy, and perhaps even some freed up income... all in exchange for a home with less square footage than most.  

And while it's widely recognized that living tiny gives you more opportunities to travel and enjoy the great outdoors, the best kept secret to owning a tiny house is that all it takes is some clever landscaping to remove most of the downsides of less living space.  Most tiny house dwellers accomplish this by building a deck, but for whatever reason, the next trick goes almost entirely untold.  So let us introduce you to the new best friend to tiny homes everywhere: Stout Tents!

(Full disclosure, we reached out to Stout Tents about receiving their product in exchange for an honest review.  But, we assure you that a) we reached out to them specifically because of how high-quality their tents are, and b) the benefits of this tent are completely undeniable.)

Here’s a quick overview of the details before we dive into how essential this tent has become to our daily lives.

Stout Tent PRO w/ Bug Netting — 16 ft.

Materials: 

• 10.6 oz 100% cotton canvas (waterproof & mold resistant)

• Heavy duty ripstop PVC ground sheet

• 2.4 oz bug netted secondary wall (can be removed independent of the main canvas wall)

• Everything is double-stitch sewn and seems extremely durable

• Comes with a compact and durable carrying case

Our Favorite Features:

• Versatility — this tent can be set up in so many ways. On hot days, we open up the bottom of the canvas wall to let air flow in through the whole tent. On cooler days, we drop the walls and crank up our ceramic heater.

• Quality — One of our primary motivations for getting a tiny house was that it gave us the ability to design every aspect of our home at the highest possible quality. We loathe cheaply made stuff that wears out after a few months or a year. Our tent is obviously built to last. Better still, Stout Tent offers full service on their tents and a maintenance package. Ship them your tent, and they’ll send it back in brand new condition. Amazing…

• Mobility — Even though we don’t plan on moving our tiny house much, at times, we imagine ourselves living like nomads of long ago… traveling caravans, composed of mobile and semi-permanent structures. This tent completes the picture for sure. Our home is our caravan and our tent is our place-marker.

• Camping and Festivals — We love using the tent at our house, but it’s great to know that we could easily pack it up to go glamping or to summer festivals (Burning Man, please?!?!).

How we use it:

We turned our tent into a Moroccan lounge space with tons of pillows, rugs, and an incredibly comfortable inflatable camping mattress. We ran electricity to our tent, so we’ve got lights, a fan/heater, and can easily charge our devices.

We’re out in our tent at least twice a day: mornings and evenings.  In the mid-morning, we take Escher to the tent to play and bounce around before her nap.  We've set up a little drawing station for her and some storage cubes for her toys. Having this extra "room" has helped us adapt to going tiny with a little one -- having different spaces to play and a change of scenery can be such a boon!

Once she’s in bed for the evening, the two of us head out to the tent to lounge around, eat, talk, watch a movie, and generally relax. Since our house doesn’t have 100 sq.ft. to spare for just laying around, having this extra space is incredible.  We've also discovered how pleasant it can be to simply walk our grounds, from our house to the tent… it just makes everything feel so expansive. 

Honestly, the tent gets too hot for us to use during mid-afternoon.  Stout Tents sells a sun shade that would likely fix this, but we'll probably set up our own sail instead.  Combine that with a fan or small AC unit, and it would probably stay nice and cool throughout the day.

Overall:

This simple product has added so much space and diversity to our home that we don’t think we'd ever go back.  And it's really nice having a "guest bedroom" where we can easily and comfortably host our overnight guests. Between our deck and our tent, we hardly feel like we live in a tiny house at all. We feel like we live on 10,000 sq.ft. of land and we enjoy every inch of it.