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Our TINY HOME IN THE SWISS ALPS (full tour)

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Two hours of climbing with a full pack, and the reward is a cabin perched above the Alps with no road in sight.

Kara and Nate Buchanan have made a career out of chasing the world’s most remote lodging, and in episode 649 of their long-running travel vlog, they finally check off a bucket-list format they’d never tried: the tiny home. The couple hauls their packs up a mountainside in the Swiss Alps for two hours to reach an off-grid cabin accessible only on foot, then spends the episode walking viewers through every inch of it, from the wooden deck out front to the compact living quarters inside.

• Switzerland marks the 92nd country Kara and Nate have visited as part of their ongoing mission to reach all 100.
• The tiny home is reachable only by a rigorous two-hour hike, with guests carrying their own packs the entire way.
• Episode 649 documents the first time the couple has ever stayed overnight in a tiny home.

The Hike Up

There’s no driveway, no cable car, no shortcut. Getting to this particular tiny home means a two-hour climb up an alpine trail with a full pack on your back, and the video captures that slog in real time — the switchbacks, the elevation gain, the moment the structure finally comes into view above the treeline. Drone footage threaded throughout the episode pulls back to show just how isolated the setting really is, with panoramic shots of the surrounding peaks framing the tiny home as little more than a speck on the mountainside.

No road, no lift, no shortcut — just a two-hour climb with your pack on your back to reach a cabin with no neighbors for miles.

Inside the Self-Sufficient Retreat

Once inside, the tour reveals a space built around the same principle that defines every tiny home: nothing wasted, everything doubled up. The living area packs in a sofa, coffee table, and dining table within a footprint most people would consider a single room, while a loft overlooking the main floor adds sleeping space without expanding the home’s actual square footage. The kitchen fits a stove, refrigerator, and sink into a galley run, and the bathroom — tiled walls, walk-in shower, functioning toilet — proves the format doesn’t require sacrificing basic comfort.

What stands out most is how lived-in it all feels despite the compact scale. Kara and Nate move through the space the way they would any home tour on their channel, opening cabinets, testing the loft ladder, and pointing the camera at the small design choices — built-in storage, multi-use furniture — that make a structure this size livable for extended stays rather than just a novelty overnight.

Life Off the Grid

The cabin runs independent of any municipal grid, which is really the only way a structure this remote could function. That off-grid setup is part of what makes the location viable in the first place — there’s no infrastructure to hike a power line or water main up a mountain, so the home has to generate and manage its own resources on-site. It’s the same self-sufficient logic that shows up across a lot of remote-living builds, the kind featured in tours like the self-built, off-grid floating home that runs on a similar independence from outside utilities.

Outside, the wooden deck is the payoff for the two-hour climb — lounge seating set up to look straight out at the alpine range, no houses, no towns, nothing but ridgelines. It’s the kind of vantage point that explains why remote micro-structures keep showing up across the travel space, alongside builds like the Pinecone Treehouse, where the appeal is less about square footage and more about where the four walls happen to sit.

Country Number 92

For Kara and Nate, this stop is one entry in a much bigger ledger. The couple is working through a self-imposed goal of visiting 100 countries, and Switzerland lands as number 92 on that list. The tiny home stay doesn’t change the math on that count, but it does give them a format they’d never tried in nearly six years of near-constant travel — and by their own framing in the episode, it’s the best place they’d stayed all year.