A Bellevue College graduate’s first professional housing design and construction may have been small in size, but was a big success.

Alumnus Brandon Reim won the American Society of Interior Designers’ shipping container project — the society’s first-ever student competition. The recent graduate was able to see his vision for a tiny home made from a 40-foot-long shipping container come to life last month.

The society put forth the challenge to seven Washington state colleges and universities, including Bellevue College, last year. Riem heard about it through his professor and again at a college event, and thought it would be a good way to get his name out there and learn more about the industry.

The project was new for the society as well as the student designers. Hirschman said that the 40-foot-long shipping container was much smaller than what most of the professional designers-members had worked on before.

“Nobody ever focuses on the little, tiny spaces,” she said. “But with the focus on tiny spaces from TV shows, people have really been beginning to talk about it.”

While living spaces under 1,000 square feet only make up 1 percent of the housing market, the demand for the financially beneficial spaces has been growing since the recession. Nearly 70 percent of tiny house owners have no mortage, compared to 29 percent of all U.S. homowners, according to website thetinylife.com.

With only 320-square-feet of living space to use in their designs, the students had trouble fitting everything into their proposals, Hirschman said. Household items like washing machines, dryers, dishwashers and other items were often missing.

“I think they felt like they didn’t have enough space for them because of the conception of a standard room size. A lot of it was based on inexperience. Most of them have really never worked in the field,” Hirschman said. This was also many students’ first time working within a budget, she added.

Reim revised his draft proposal several times because of space challenges. A queen bed had to be replaced with a full-sized bed to allocate walking space and a doorway, while the two space-saving sliding doors he had originally included had to be replaced by egress doors that would open inwards or outwards to abide by state safety codes.

“I learned that there was a lot of procedures that you have to do to make a tiny house work,” he said. “My favorite part was putting everything together — space planning — and imagining how everything would work. Imagining what I would want if I was living in a tiny home. It was like putting together the puzzle.”

Since graduating, Reim has been working in residential furniture design. But he is considering doing more tiny house designs and said he’s open to the idea of downsizing and living in a tiny house himself one day.