Meet Peter Huggler of Indigo River Tiny Homes in Downtown Garland

Today we’d like to introduce you to Peter Huggler.

Peter, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I have over 15 years of construction experience. I first found out about tiny houses in June of 2017. Once I started looking at them and how cool you could make the design and features, I just became totally obsessed with the idea. I love how much customization you can put into them and since it’s such a small space you can do high end finish outs and still have the home be reasonably affordable. The other aspects of this emerging industry that really appealed to me was the amount of collaboration and sense of community around tiny houses. So I brought the idea to some friends that we’ve worked with on some projects in the past. They liked it and we started planning our business and our first build. My son and I built our first tiny house over a 6 month period, just working on it 1 day a week and a couple of full weeks. By the time we completed our first build in March of 2018, I decided that this was what I want to do for a living. So I quit my job with a large home improvement company and started designing and building tiny houses full time. While starting a new business is challenging both professionally and personally, I couldn’t have done it without the help and support of my family and our great business partners. Tiny houses are my passion and I’m excited to see what the future has in store for this industry!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Building tiny houses is not what the television shows crack it up to be. It costs a lot more to do it and there’s so many intricate details that get overlooked by the typical DIYer that as a professional builder we have to take into consideration, such as building codes that regulate the industry. The 2 biggest challenges to people that want to own a tiny home (and thereby to selling tiny homes), are: 1) A place to park it; and, 2) Financing. There are very few municipalities across the nation that will allow tiny houses on wheels to be lived in. So most people end up either renting a space at an RV Park or renting or buying property outside city limits where the building codes allow houses on wheels. The second challenge of financing is primarily due to the infancy of the industry. Tiny houses don’t fit into any of the current categories of what can be financed. And there isn’t enough data on the resale value of tiny houses to compute the depreciation of the home once it has been lived in for a few years. There is now one private equity group and one bank that are providing funding for the purchase of tiny homes. And several other equity groups are investigating the prospect.

Indigo River Tiny Homes – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Our company designs and builds custom tiny homes on wheels (THOW). We have three needs that we try to meet in the market place: Easy Travel, Easy Sleep, and Easy Living. Our houses are designed to be towable and lighter weight than the typical tiny house. One need that we identified early on was the need for easy in and out of bed. We kept hearing over and over statements such as: “It’s really nice but I couldn’t do the sleeping loft”. So we’ve designed all of our models to have either a downstairs bedroom or a split level loft where you can stand up next to your bed instead of crawl on hands and knees. The third trait of Easy Living can mean a lot of different things to different people. We want our homes to be functional, an expression of the owners personality, and affordable.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
The third tiny house we built was a custom home for a lady that was referred to us. When we met with her and she was describing her eclectic tastes and everything she wanted in her home, I was wondering “how are we going to pull this off?” She then brought in a truck load of items she had been collecting over the last couple of years that she wanted incorporated into her home. I was really concerned at that point of being able to build something that we wanted to put our name on. I didn’t think we would even want to put pictures up on our website. But as we began to design her home around these items and as the build progressed, what I consider to be a work of art emerged, that we lovingly dubbed “The Prairie Dog”. The house turned out better than I ever imagined. She was overjoyed by the end result and that’s what is really important.

Pricing:

• We have towable tiny homes starting at $40,000 up to $90,000

Contact Info:

• Address: 209 Austin St
  Garland, TX 75040
• Website: www.IndigoRiverTiny.com
• Phone: 972-591-3951
• Email: IndigoRiverTiny@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/indigorivertinyhomes/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IndigoRiverTinyHomes/?view_public_for=1981917912024222
• Other: https://www.pinterest.com/indigorivertinyhomes/?autologin=true

Image Credit:
Christina Wester

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