Case Study - The Oculus Retreat House
Date:
August, 2025
Written by:
Christiane Partl
Published in:
Pip Magazine, Issue 37
Mobile Architecture, redefining modern living
On a quiet patch of hinterland near Byron Bay, a small but striking structure sits gently on the land. Sculptural and grounded, The Oculus is far from a standard tiny house.
It’s the first model by Retreat House, a new venture by long-time builder Chris King, and a compelling response to some of the major challenges we’re facing in today’s housing landscape.
This tiny home is the result of deep intention, hands-on experimentation, and over three decades of building experience. It reflects Chris’s evolving philosophy around living smaller, building better, and treading more lightly in an era where both affordability and sustainability feel increasingly out of reach.
Created in collaboration with architect Hayley Pryor, The Oculus is a high-end, architecturally considered, climate-responsive, movable home that brings design integrity into a space typically defined by minimal budgets and compromises. It challenges assumptions about what a tiny house is and what it can be, setting a new standard in small-footprint living.
A Builder’s Evolution
Chris King has been building for over 30 years, but his interest in sustainability began much earlier. In his twenties, he studied biology and immersed himself in permaculture, which has helped shape how he sees the built environment today.
“The whole idea of designing with nature has always been a big part for me,” he says. “But I got sidetracked, as many do, down the path of conventional building.”
A few years ago when his son moved out to join the army, Chris built is first tiny house, now his full-time residence. The home is a daily reminder of how little space is actually needed to live well. “It really helped confirm to me what tiny home living has to offer, and also what was missing from it,” Chris reflects. “There’s this ingrained idea that we need a huge amount of space but that idea doesn’t hold up in reality.”
Living small, focussed his attention to what mattered, not just personally, but professionally. What began as curiosity soon became a mission: to bring architecture, healthy materials, climate responsive design and quality craftsmanship to a typology often driven by cost and proving that small-scale living doesn’t mean sacrificing good design.
His second project was a compact moveable office, helping him refine construction techniques and further understand the lifestyle shifts involved in tiny living. Then came The Oculus, his third and most ambitious tiny home yet.
The Design
The design of The Oculus was driven by both environmental conditions and the realities of what you can (and can’t) do with a transportable dwelling. Working with architect Hayley Pryor, Chris set out to solve the key problems he’d identified during his own experience of tiny living and lengthy research, starting with heat and airflow.
The design process was about distilling big ideas into a small footprint, where nothing is wasted.
Compact buildings amplify both gains and losses. With so little interior volume, poor planning around ventilation or sun exposure can quickly make them uncomfortable, especially in heat of the subtropics.
“The smaller the home, the harder it has to work. You can’t get away with lazy design. Every surface, join, and junction matters.”
Then there are the transport limitations. To be road-legal, a tiny home must fall within strict dimensional limits: 2.5 metres wide, 4.3 metres high, and under 4.5 tonnes. “This one’s built on an 8.4 metre trailer and includes a removable drawbar as we wanted to reduce the visual impact of it looking like a typical tiny home,” Chris explains.
Keeping it road-ready added extra complexity, especially when it came to material selection and engineering. “This thing is right on the weight limit,” he says. “So you need a specialist to move it. There are lots of tiny home transport companies around now. I moved the other ones here with my Ranger, which was not a great idea, I would not recommend it to anybody”.
The design is a reflection of how limitations, when approached with creativity, can lead to something both innovative and functional.
The Oculus Skylight
At the centre of the home is its namesake and defining feature: an operable skylight. The Oculus is a high-performance design element that transformed the whole building drawing in light, facilitating natural ventilation and offering views of the sky.
“The oculus was our big solve,” Chris says. “Tiny homes can overheat fast. They’ve got a high surface-to-volume ratio, and up here in the subtropics, winters are short and the sun is intense. So we knew ventilation had to be passive, reliable and central to the design.”
The solution was a roofline that functions as a thermal chimney. Hot air rises through the skylight while cooler air is drawn in through louvres and lower-level openings, keeping the home comfortable year-round without the need for air conditioning.
Climate-Driven Form
One of the most unexpected features of The Oculus is its set of removable wraparound eaves, something rarely seen on transportable homes.
“Eaves were non-negotiable,” Chris says. “They protect the building, they reduce heat gain, and they just make it feel like a proper piece of architecture.”
In the Byron area, where rainfall can be intense and wind-driven, shielding the windows and doors is essential. These eaves do that job while also adding shade and depth to the façade.
Designing them to be removable proved to be a major challenge. Months of prototyping led to an innovative solution using folded galvanised steel sheets, stainless rod and turnbuckles suspension. The eaves slide into custom-welded brackets enabling easy removal for transportation.
“The idea was to keep it simple and strong but also beautiful. I think we landed in a good place.”
Building Smarter
Materiality is crucial to this project. The exterior is wrapped in galvanised mini-orb, a classic, durable material that echoes rural Australian sheds. Inside, the finishes are refined and warm: hardwood ply joinery, handmade ceramic tiles from Japan, recycled wire brush finished timber floorboards create a tactile interior space. The finishes were chosen not only for their look, but how they contribute to the overall ambience and longevity. Without a permanent or fixed location, the structure needed to be able to blend into both rural and urban environments. This has been achieved through a paired back, natural palette.
Weight remained a constant consideration. “You start looking at everything in terms of kilos per square metre,” Chris says. “We’ll probably swap out the 19mm hardwood floorboards in the next model as they’re a bit too heavy.”
Particular focus was given to the building envelope with performance a major driver. The wall system uses a vapour-permeable membrane from Pro Clima, combined with a ventilated cavity and thermally broken steel framing. This helps regulate humidity and prevents condensation, which is a common problem.
“One of the biggest issues up here is mould inside wall cavities,” Chris explains. “If humid air moves through insulation and hits a cold surface, it condenses. Over time that can cause major mould problems. So we’ve built in a breathable, weather-tight envelope that lets moisture escape, and keeps the interior dry and healthy.”
Low-E glazing and passive solar design round out the performance strategy, ensuring year-round comfort with minimal energy input.
Living small
Chris has been living in his own tiny home for 18 months now and it’s given him plenty of insight into the lifestyle side of small-space living.
“I think it’s much easier than people imagine,” he says. “It’s a great excuse to get rid of stuff. You realise how little you actually need. Tiny houses offer so much flexibility and it's a really beautiful, simple way to live. It's just shifting that mindset around how much space we think we need. To me the benefits far outweigh what can be gained by all that extra space.”
With fewer things and less space to maintain, there’s more time to focus on what matters.
\Every item has its place, and the design encourages you to stay organised and intentional. “You need to be able to use spaces in multiple ways. I love not just the tactility of it, but the mechanics behind it. You do have to manage the space, move a few things around if you want to do yoga, that sort of thing. But that’s part of the fun.”
Storage has to work really hard, and so does the layout. Every element serves more than one purpose. But with clever design, small living doesn’t have to feel like a compromise, it can feel freeing. You become more aware connected to the rhythms of the day and the seasons and that’s something special.
A Model for What’s Next
While The Oculus is a beautiful finished home, it’s also a prototype, the first in what Chris hopes will become a range of climate-responsive designs under Retreat House.
“We need to design smarter, build smaller, and think longer-term,” he says. “We saw the housing crisis really happen up here post-COVID and post-floods. People are priced out. Land is scarce and rentals limited. People are struggling. We have to rethink things.”
Chris believes tiny homes play an important role in a shift towards a more varied and sustainable housing ecosystem. “Residential builds in Australia need to be more diverse and I think tiny homes are an important part of future housing. For me they’ve become the perfect place to try different things and experiment with responsible design and construction. I saw a real gap in the tiny house sector for contemporary architecture and high level design thinking. Quality and craftsmanship was really something that we wanted to explore and bring to the table.”
Chris and the architects’ vision for Retreat House is not just about building homes, but about. encouraging a more intentional and sustainable lifestyle.
Beyond the Build
The Oculus is more than a structure, it’s a conversation starter. A way to ask bigger questions: What do I really need? How do I really want to live?
In answering those questions, we may just discover that less can actually be more, more freedom, more clarity, and more connection.
The Oculus proves that when design leads, even the smallest spaces can hold big ideas. Ones that challenge our assumptions about size, comfort and what constitutes “enough.”
In a world burdened by overconsumption and devastating pressure on natural resources, this project offers a compelling alternative. Built not only to move, but to move us towards a lighter, more intentional way of living.
Date:
August, 2025
Written by:
Christiane Partl
Photos by:
Tim Clark
Published in:
Pip Magazine, Issue 37