Tiny house review: Unyoked's Micah "hideout"

Tiny houses are the future. There, I said it. And not just for living in. Ever since tiny houses started colonising travel a few years ago, tiny low-impact weekenders have been sprouting up everywhere - and by "everywhere" I mean places so off-grid all your phone is good for is as a paperweight while trying to read a book outdoors.

Bed by Unyoked (and pic)

This post is about one of the "tiny house stay" pioneers - Micah, by Unyoked - and it's the final episode in my Goldilocks series reviewing four "tiny house stays" I experienced earlier this year.

(If you missed the others, they were: Edmond, just south of Sydney, Tallarook Tiny Home on the NSW south coast and Fred's Tiny House in Castlemaine, Victoria. And for more on the whole "tiny house stay" thing, see my tiny house travel story in Traveller.)

Unyoked origins
Tiny house stays officially arrived in Australia when twin brothers Cam and Chris Grant quit their corporate jobs in Sydney and set up Unyoked in 2016.

Cam & Chris in Unyoked country

Inspired by the sense of freedom and adventure they felt as kids when camping and hiking, they built the first architect-designed tiny houses for rent and put them on privately owned wilderness blocks a couple of hours from Sydney and Melbourne. But these weren't just escape hatches from modern life.

"It's not just about renting tiny houses," says Cam. "We want people, through our experience, to realise that sitting at a desk for eight to 10 hours a day, answering emails in bed and feeling guilty for taking that one trip at the end of the year isn't the way we have to live.

"I think collectively we're starting to realise that and more and more of us are looking to get back to simpler times, to reconnect with nature and get off-grid once in a while."

Country Victoria roads...

Meet Micah
Just getting to Micah, one of Unyoked's six tiny houses, felt like a small adventure, despite it being only an hour from Melbourne. Mr No Impact Girl and I drove along dirt roads under Simpsons-blue skies dotted with fluffy clouds, through five farm gates, past sheep and windmills.

Parking inside the last gate, we loaded our bags and an esky into a little black wagon, and trundled down the hill to where Micah sat - in a paddock ringed by gnarled old eucalypts beside the bone-dry Campaspe River. A few lonesome crows provided the outback soundtrack.

There she is! (Because like ships,
tinys are always girls)

One of the best things about the Unyoked experience is that there's no one to meet you when you arrive.

You probably won't see another human being during your stay, in fact (except the one you brought with you) or anything man-made.

This is why Unyoked calls its tiny houses "cabins" or "hideouts". As Cam Grant explains: "What we're trying to do is emulate the experience of hiking through a forest and finding your own cabin in the woods."

Micah's minimialist facade

Bed + moon
First impressions: Micah is the epitome of simple, basically an off-grid wooden box, on wheels cleverly concealed by stacked campfire-wood. It also has a flat roof instead of the storybook gable roof seen on most tiny houses.

Most different of all, there's no loft bed. Instead the queen bed is at waist-height, a signature Unyoked feature. Much as I love the cubbyhouse feeling of climbing a ladder to bed, I also loved this bed-couch-daybed. Plus it was flanked by two enormous picture windows that brought the outdoors in.

Happiness is a sunny bed

So you can curl up with a cup of tea or your favourite person, or both, and watch the wind dancing in the trees, the sheep grazing, those crows flying by.

In other words, you can be inside and still keep abreast of what's going on in the real world, i.e. outside.

Even after dark. That night, after an early dinner, we lounged in bed and watched the best show in town: the full moon rising from behind the nearest hill. The next morning we saw the sequel, also from bed: a spectacular sunrise.

(Since our stay, Unyoked has made their beds even more comfy with mattresses by Koala, which donates part of its profits to koala conservation, and In Bed natural bed linen.)

A cabin of wood + light

A Scandi-Japanese cabin
Beyond the bed, Micah's plywood interior gives it a cosy, cabin-y feeling, a nod to Unyoked's Scandi-Japan design ethos. There's plenty of natural light - from the sliding door, those two picture windows and another window over the sink.

I loved the minimalist kitchen with its camping-esque gas cooktop and white enamel plates, bowls and cups.

Wine supplied (for a price)

Micah had possibly the best reading matter of all the tinys I stayed in: a stack of Penguin paperbacks including Call of the Wild and Picnic at Hanging Rock (because Hanging Rock is just down the road), two cabin-themed photo books and a "Field Guide" full of need-to-know guest info.

Other thoughtful touches included: hot water bottles for cold nights, a couple of yoga mats, loose leaf tea and coffee beans - plus a grinder, a plunger and an aeropress coffee maker. And there were "provisions" (with price tags) such as wine and pancake kits.

The only bit I wasn't crazy about was Micah's bathroom. Everything necessary was there - composting toilet, hot shower, handbasin. It just looked like an afterthought, a sort of in-house outhouse.

Barefoot on prickly grass

The verdict
Micah's location and non-loft bed are its winning features and I love that Cam and Chris are thinking outside the hotel room box, curating experiences with a sense of fun and creativity.

Most importantly, they really deliver on the "unyoked" promise: helping you step away from the striving-working-busy vehicle and surrender to a slower way of being in the world, if only for a night or two.

*

Micah's sunset view

How to do it: Unyoked's six tiny houses - three near Sydney and three near Melbourne - are about to get 15 new siblings. Within the next 12 months there'll be three more each outside Sydney and Melbourne, the rest near Brisbane and Canberra, in northern NSW and in Tasmania. See unyoked.co

While you're there: Kyneton is cute as a button that's fallen off your favourite shirt. Only an hour's drive northwest of Melbourne, and situated in the beautiful Macedon Ranges, it's country and creative in equal measure. Loved The Town Roaster, a retro-style cafe with crazy-good coffee and sugar-free treats and The Hamster, for vegetarian fare. At Mineral Springs Park you can fill your bottles with mineral water, for free. Hanging Rock (of Peter Weir's "Picnic at" fame) is 10 minutes away. And on hot summer days you can cool off with a swim at two nearby waterfalls: Trentham and Turpin's.

Gratitude: Thanks to Unyoked for hosting us for a night at Micah. I can recommend their free weekly "Dispatches" too, creative emails bearing tiny-related news items like "why silence is good for your brain".