Hold on to your skivvies—there’s a new tiny home hotel in town. Slabtown Village, on NW Overton Street just north of the streetcar tracks, opened for business in May 2018. The concept? A mix of renovated existing homes—three petite Victorians—clustered around a shotgun-style courtyard of three new modern tiny homes.
“Each house is named after a Portlander who lived specifically in the NW,” says John Jendritza, one of Slabtown Village’s owners.
Jendritza says each of the six rentable dwellings feature decorative details of each person it’s named after. In Beverly House—named after beloved children’s book author Beverly Cleary, guests will find framed pages of her writing. And in Walton House, posters of, yup, legendary Trailblazer Bill Walton. The Vera Katz Tiny Home, appropriately, is home to a map of the city managed by this late, great Portland mayor.
Owners Jendritza and Grant Norling originally bought the three Victorian homes to serve as office space for their spouses, both psychologists. The two friends were concerned by the city’s rapid buildout—ever-present bulldozing, towering high-rises—so they committed instead to preserving and updating their row of homes. In between Beverly Cleary and the home now called the Loveridge was just enough space to build out three tiny homes: the Vera, along with the Weidler and the Henry (Weinhard; so naturally, guests staying here will find two bottles of beer waiting on the counter.)
“The tiny homes were built by hand,” says Norling. “A lot of attention went into the details.”
Among those details are sleek countertops made of marble or quartz, shelves made of live-edge slabs (because Slabtown), and Netflix-enabled flatscreens. Norling and Jendritza consciously decided on a sleek, minimalist look for the village—in part to differentiate their property from some of Portland’s more whimsical tiny home hotels.
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