Explore these tiny buildings at this year’s Seattle Home Show

The Seattle Home Show starts this weekend and runs all week, with vendors peddling everything from flooring to window treatments to fire pits to the Home Show classic starry-ceiling painters at Stellar Vision.

Like last year, the Home Show has a strong emphasis on tiny homes, spaces, and retreats—whether for a backyard getaway, an accessory dwelling unit, a vacation destination, or small-scale homeownership.

While not every small, prefab solution that you can live in can fit inside the Exhibition Center, one exhibitor, Carriage Houses Northwest, will be showing off their goods again. This year, the houses will have a little something extra: smart home technology, which was absolutely a big thing at last year’s home show, just not in these little packages.

This tiny house has Alexa-controlled lighting, security cameras, and music.

Courtesy of Seattle Home Show

“Home ownership is out of reach for so many, so tiny is a viable option,” said Carriage Houses Northwest owner Kurt Galley in a statement. (The company also builds tiny homes for the homeless.)

Galley acknowledges that “tiny is both a liberating and difficult decision,” though: “You really need to determine if organizing your life in such a way that living tiny would be life-giving rather than a hardship you have to just learn to deal with.”

Because restrictions in building code—and the high price of land alone—a lot of these items are going to end up as outbuildings on existing properties, anyway, not more affordable solutions for people that don’t already own a home.

That includes another repeat from last year: backyard, gendered clubhouses—standalone dens branded as “she sheds” and “man caves,” but could be enjoyed by anyone of any gender, depending on their personal aesthetics and interests. Just be prepared for some very binary branding on these kinds of buildings.

One doesn’t have to identify strictly as a woman to enjoy some breezy beach looks, like French doors, pendant lights, and curtains in one option on display again this year by Aurora Quality Buildings. And one doesn’t have to subscribe to any notions of masculinity to want a fully realized dive bar in their backyard, like one offering last year by the same company.

Courtesy of Seattle Home Show

A few options by Heritage Portable Buildings range from more homey—with a small porch and a welcoming front door—to a slightly revamped garden shed with a side window.

Courtesy of Seattle Home Show

The Seattle Home Show runs from Saturday, February 17 through Sunday, February 25 at Centurylink Field Event Center in Sodo.