It was March 2014, and skier Zack Giffin was camped out in an Outdoor Research-funded tiny home on wheels on Rogers Pass, outside of Revelstoke, B.C., when he got a call from some TV executive in New York City. Two months earlier, Giffin had answered a casting call for a new reality TV show about the tiny house movement, but he hadn’t heard a word back. Now, suddenly, he was hired for the show and had to get himself to New York as soon as possible.
“They’re like, ‘You’re hired. Please return this contract today,’” Giffin recalls. “I was like, ‘I’m going skiing. It’s going to take me a few days’.” Giffin, a long-sponsored skier from Mount Baker, Wash., went on to become the host and star of “Tiny House Nation,” a hit TV show that ran from 2014 until 2019 and is currently streaming on Netflix.
In addition to helping popularize the tiny house movement, Giffin has also worked tirelessly to dissolve the legal prohibitions against tiny homes so they can become viable, affordable solutions to the workforce housing crisis, an issue that’s plagued ski towns across the country. “I’ve been a ski bum a lot longer than I’ve been a tiny house expert,” he says. “Ski bums have always lived minimally in order to survive in resort towns.”
These days, Giffin, who still skis every day he can, is the program director of a national Veterans’ nonprofit called Operation Tiny Home, and he serves as the vice president of the Tiny House Industry Association. We called him up to talk about how you can live large by going small.