• Urban planner Darling Dinsmore has created a camp of four small homes in Sedona, Arizona.
• The small cabin is cliffside and designed to feel like a treehouse.
• Dinsmore lists small cabins on Airbnb starting at $200 a night.

This is a verbatim essay based on a conversation with city planner and founder of TinyCamp, TinyCamp, which collects short-term rentals of tiny houses in Sedona and Cottonwood, Arizona. Edited for length and clarity.

My urban planning background was one of the inspirations for starting the TinyCamp project in Sedona and Cottonwood, Arizona.

I moved to Sedona three years ago to work on these projects, but I’m also the founder and CEO of a software startup based in the California Bay Area. cloud bright. It took me 10 years to travel the world to start the company, and when I came to Sedona, I thought, ‘This is not a bad place to relax.

Five years ago, Coconino County, where Sedona and Cottonwood are located, was using a tool I created and they contacted me and said, be interested? “I thought it was great, so I decided to attend his TinyCamp in Sedona.

Inspired from my time living in a houseboat in Sausalito, California.

Sausalito has such a community and we didn’t need many. It was a place where you would meet your neighbors, as you would have to walk along the dock to get home.

For our Sedona property, we worked with a local builder to build a cliffside home. These are all permanent small homes with foundations and fire sprinklers, each with their own private hot tub and fireplace. It feels like a tree house.

We wanted to incorporate an indoor-outdoor experience, so having a deck, patio, hot tub, and fire pit was important. Our homes are unique and not all are the same, so it’s not like staying in a hotel. They all have names like ‘Grow’, ‘Flow’ and ‘Breath’.

We have a lot of visitors, many of whom can’t find us through Airbnb

When people google ‘Tiny House in Arizona’ they show us up. They want unique experiences. I proposed here and celebrated my honeymoon. People want to make memories.

We offer amenities to make your memories special. Also, people may want a health and wellness-focused stay, so you can arrange for a yoga practitioner or even set up a sound healing session. Like our unit’s name, people are coming to renew and breathe themselves.

I’ve seen this a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic. People live in big cities like Los Angeles, feeling trapped in their apartments and wanting to get out and connect with nature while they can work remotely.

People are shocked, but small houses are expensive

The land and tiny house cost about $250,000 to $275,000 each.. Tiny house prices have increased significantly. I recently went to the Tiny House Festival, Selling between $100,000 and $135,000. Material costs soared, and demand hit the ceiling.

A regular stay starts at $200 and a stay with a private hot tub is $250. The Achilles heel of the Tiny House movement is that sewer connections cost $10,000. Even a 5,000 square foot house is $10,000 for him. This surprises people. I was shocked when I found out that the connection charges were the same.

As the movement grows, more and more people are buying land for small homes, but prospective small home owners should be careful as they do not have the proper permits.

The hospitality aspect is new to me but fun at this point in life

You can mingle with cool people who have come to Northern Arizona for yoga retreats and hikes and want to reconnect with nature.

TinyCamp Sedona wanted to help the community as well and partnered with a local charter school in need of teacher housing. We built a school for them on the campus of our charter school.

At Cottonwood, which opened this summer, units were built to feel more like a community. The wine scene there is growing, so people love to visit the tasting rooms. You can also see young people coming to the store.

Our larger vision is to create local housing and adventure accommodations.

Imagine every 4-room affordable residential unit in every Sedona hotel. Then there will be no housing problem.

We want to participate not only in housing solutions, but also in sustainable tourism solutions. We are also working on a project in Clarkdale, Arizona.

Clarkdale was actually the first planned community when Arizona was a mining town. So we are kind of following in its footsteps. Our Clarkdale Project is a 50% affordable local home with dog park and community garden.