Turkey-based trailer manufacturer Ortsan Outdoor’s recent creation, the Ortsan Mini House, has been garnering attention online. Ortsan Mini House is essentially a tiny camper that the makers describe as “combining the look of a tiny house with a hybrid tent-and-caravan concept.” The tiny house-RV combo stands apart from other dwellings and trailers on the market, thanks to its unique accordion-style design, which expands the interior space, thus tripling its size. We’ll get to all those details, but first, let’s start with the core structure of the Ortsan Mini House.
Measuring 13 feet long and 6.8 feet wide, the Ortsan Mini House is poised on a single-axle trailer. When stationed, the Mini House opens up by dropping both sidewalls like an accordion, bringing canvas walls into place. The concept isn’t completely novel. Dutch architect Eduard Böhtlingk introduced the De Markies prototype back in 1985, an accordion-style camper that more or less did the same thing, but it was never intended for mass production.
Mini House is meant for mass production, though, and what makes it stand out among other trailers and tiny homes on the market is how it squeezes maximum living space out of a compact travel. To put that into perspective, Mini House expands its living area from roughly 90 square feet to about 219 square feet. The layout gives you a private bedroom on one end and a balcony-slash-living room on the other. The full-width bathroom finds room at the front end of the trailer.
As for the kitchen, it runs almost the entire length of the home. It comes standard with a 90-liter 12V fridge, a two-burner gas cooktop, a round stainless-steel sink, push-to-open cabinets and drawers, plenty of prep space, and a slide-out table tucked away in a drawer.
Other features include a wood-burning stove, an air conditioning system, and a Webasto diesel heater. Not to mention, a smart TV with integrated multimedia infrastructure that will keep dwellers entertained. Another notable highlight is a tablet that acts as the control center for the lights, heating, cooling, and the expandable wings themselves.
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Ortsan Mini House boasts some serious off-grid prowess, too. This includes 470 watts of solar panels on the roof, a 200Ah lithium battery, and an inverter, paired with a 200-liter freshwater tank and a matching gray-water tank. Other features include a cassette toilet with its own small tank that needs to be emptied regularly.
The accordion layout does come with trade-offs. The most prominent of those disadvantages is the time taken to set up the trailer. Another disadvantage, I would say, is that the storage is concentrated in the kitchen, bathroom, and a box on the tongue, since the fold-out wings can’t carry anything when packed away. Still, that’s a fair exchange for a camper that travels this small and lives this large. The Ortsan Mini House is priced at around $19,300. Given how much it packs into its footprint, that’s quite affordable for an RV enthusiast who wants freedom without the excess.
