Laëtitia Dupé is the French industrial designer who co-founded tiny house company Baluchon; we last looked at her outside-the-box design thinking here, where she made the decision to place the front door in the bathroom. Her new Hellebore model, custom designed for a couple in France, demonstrates similarly creative thinking.

In nearly every tiny house you'll see, the bed is elevated within the structure. In Dupé's design for the Hellebore, instead the bedroom is on the ground level.

Above it is a relatively tall and sunny living room, featuring a large window and a desk.

You may ask: Why elevate the living room rather than the bedroom? I've not communicated with Dupé, but the answer seems obvious. Since the bedroom is primarily for lying down in, the ceiling height—and thus the floor height of the living room—can be a lot lower.

This reduces the amount and rise of the steps required to reach the living room. If the arrangement were reversed, you'd either need more steps or steps with a greater rise. By inverting the arrangement, Dupé has cleverly saved space.

Another clever thing about those steps is that the lower two are removable. Removing them not only provides access to more storage space beneath the top two steps, but allows the user to use the lower two as a stepladder to access taller storage spaces in the kitchen.

The rest of the house's design is pretty straightforward…

…with the exception of this one kink below the toilet, presumably client-requested:

Dupé describes this as a "physiological step stool;" it's essentially a built-in Squatty Potty.

You can see more of Dupé's Baluchon designs here.