Most camper vans are built for a season, a trip, or a phase of life. Nanuq was built for a way of living. This Yama Vans conversion is the rolling home base for two Alaska-based dentists who split their year between remote clinical rotations and time spent deep in the wild places that drew them north in the first place. When your work takes you off the road grid and your time off takes you even further, you don’t need a weekend toy — you need a four-season basecamp that can keep up.
Named for the Inupiaq word for polar bear, Nanuq is built on Yama’s flagship Logan01N platform: a 170″ all-wheel-drive Mercedes-Benz Sprinter engineered from the chassis up to live comfortably off-grid for weeks at a time. It’s one of the most capable expedition vans we’ve featured, and the story behind it is a great reminder that the best builds start with how someone actually lives.
After more than a decade of tiny living, Joshua and Shelley Engberg of Tiny House Basics are passing the torch: their beloved “Entertaining Abode” — the home where their whole tiny house journey began — is going up for sale.
This is the original build behind one of the most popular tiny house plan sets out there. Over the years, the Engbergs have helped hundreds of people build their own version of this 28-footer from its plans. Now the real thing is looking for its next owner.
If you have been waiting for an Escape tiny home with more breathing room, the brand-new eONE XL Wide + Tall is available now in a flash sale at $129,700 (financing available) — everything about this model has been expanded, with a wider, taller, thoughtfully redesigned layout that makes it one of the most spacious and comfortable homes ESCAPE has ever built.
Some tiny houses are built to live in full time. Others are built to make you slow down for a few days, breathe, and remember what quiet feels like. Shiva, a farmhouse-style tiny house on wheels from Simplify Further Tiny Homes, is in the second camp a private little escape dropped into an open North Florida field, complete with an outdoor clawfoot tub, a fire pit, and horses grazing just beyond the fence.
The Shiva tiny home by Simplify Further Tiny Homes. Images courtesy of Simplify Further Tiny Homes.
GB01 is where it all started — the very first Gear Bus that Yama Vans ever built. The Canadian upfitter designed it as a no-frills, all-function hauler for people who live light but carry a lot: skis and a snowboard in winter, mountain bikes in summer, and friends or family whenever the trip calls for it. Even the colors come from the outdoors, with a palette grounded in forest green, desert orange, and alpine tones.
Under the playful “The Gear Bus” graphics is a seriously capable rig: an all-wheel-drive Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 144 on all-terrain tires, a pop-top for extra sleeping space, removable seating that scales from four to ten, and a Murphy bed across the back. The layout is modular, so seats and storage rearrange in minutes to fit the trip.
Every tiny-house company has an origin story, and for Simplify Further Tiny Homes in North Central Florida, it begins with Shanti. This is the home Krsna Balynas and Govinda Carol built first — with little construction experience and a lot of secondhand materials — then listed on Airbnb just to see what would happen. It booked out almost immediately, the bookings kept coming, and a backyard experiment grew into a whole village of rentals and a full-time tiny-house building business. Today the Shanti lives on as the company’s “most simple and economical” model: a wide-open, single-level tiny house on wheels with a ground-floor queen bedroom, a real kitchen, and a full bathroom, starting around $30,000. Let’s take the tour of the home that started it all.
The Shanti tiny house by Simplify Further Tiny Homes. Images courtesy of Simplify Further Tiny Homes.
Yama Vans, a Canadian Sprinter upfitter, builds its adventure vans on a modular platform it calls the Gear Bus — “all of the thrills, some of the frills.” Peyto is one of those builds: a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 144 with all-wheel drive, finished in a deep coastal blue and set up less like a rolling apartment and more like a garage you can sleep in.
The owner uses it as a practical daily driver on Vancouver Island — commuting, running quick errands, and spending long days exploring coastal roads and forest trails by bike. Almost every design decision reflects that pace: cab seats that swivel, a small and efficient galley, gear walls in place of bulky cabinets, and a bed that folds up and out of the way when the bikes need the floor.
Meet Rolling Bear Tiny Homes, a Surrey, British Columbia builder we’re featuring for the first time, and the Honeycomb Mobile Office—a tiny house on wheels built not to live in but to work in, wrapping a full-size executive desk, a coffee-bar kitchenette, a sleeping-or-storage loft, and a bathroom inside a 16-by-8.5-foot log-cabin shell topped with a bright red standing-seam roof, so a freelancer, remote worker, or small-business owner can park a genuine private office wherever the view is best.
Some tiny houses chase minimalism; The Knoll celebrates color. Built by New Hampshire–based Backcountry Tiny Homes, this 38-foot gooseneck tiny house packs 390 square feet of bright, boho, art-filled living into a NOAH-certified home that sleeps up to five. As the builder puts it, “a large kitchen and ample storage are great features of this house, but the natural lighting and bright colors are what make it a home.” With a standing-height sleeping loft, a window-wrapped living room, a bold green kitchen, and an accessible floor plan that can change with you over the years, The Knoll proves a small footprint can feel genuinely joyful. Let’s take a look inside.
