Teacup Tiny Homes Built the Same Floor Plan Over and Over — Because It’s That Good

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The Ruby is built by Alberta-based Teacup Tiny Homes, a builder quietly making some of the most thoughtful tiny homes in North America since 2016. The Ruby is the plan that started it all and keeps evolving. What began as a custom build designed for a family of five headed to the Vancouver area has since become one of the builder’s most built and most loved floor plans, spawning a growing lineup of variations that have landed everywhere from New Brunswick to the Crowsnest Pass.

Designer: Teacup Tiny Homes

At 30 feet long and 8.5 feet wide, the Ruby lands at 380 square feet, including its two loft bedrooms, a number that doesn’t fully communicate how the interior actually feels. Wood paneling runs through the space, generous glazing pulls in natural light, and the layout gives room for a proper eating nook, a full kitchen, and a living area with space for an optional sofa bed that brings sleeping capacity up to six. The master loft is accessed by a stair at the rear, and the second loft tucks in above, making the Ruby genuinely usable for families without feeling like a compromise on either function or comfort.

The 2026 iteration, dubbed the Bar Harbor Ruby, pushes the design further. A triple shed roof maximizes headroom and adds a sense of depth and dimension that the earlier models didn’t have. Two full staircases replace the single stair setup, and the overall volume feels noticeably more spacious and resolved.

The build comes insulated to R24 in the walls and R35 in the ceiling and floor, with a full-sized bathtub available as an option, along with bay windows and a fireplace. The 2026 model starts at roughly US$127,000 plus GST, budget savvy by Teacup’s own description, which is saying something for a fully custom, towable build at this quality level.

What makes the Ruby resonate beyond its specs is the breadth of people it’s been built for. Couples, families of four, vacation rental operators, and first-time tiny dwellers, the plan adapts without losing its character. Each completed build carries a slightly different personality: the Gaia Ruby is cozy and warm, the S+N Ruby is bright and airy, and the Stella Ruby was tuned for a vacation rental. It’s rare for a single floor plan to hold that kind of range. The Ruby does, and that’s exactly why it keeps getting built.

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The Lamp That Nine Artisans Built by Hand

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Most lamps disappear into a room. They’re functional, fine, forgettable. The new collection from Taiwan-Lantern, shown this week at ICFF during NYCxDESIGN in New York, does the opposite. These are lamps you stop in front of. Lamps you study. Objects that reward attention the longer you give them.

The Amsterdam-based studio, founded by Pei-Ching Hsiao and Jean-Marc Daniëls, brought a floor and table lantern collection to Booth 843 at the Javits Center, and the visual logic of each piece is genuinely worth unpacking. The forms pull directly from the traditional East Asian paper lantern, that familiar oval body stretched over a bamboo frame, but what the studio has done with that starting point is where it gets interesting.

Designer: Taiwan-Lantern

The lantern bodies themselves are pleated fabric pulled taut over a ribbed structure, with vertical seams running from crown to base like meridian lines on a globe. Unlit, the forms are sculptural and matte, almost ceramic in feeling, which is part of what makes them so surprising when the light comes on. The fabric glows from within, casting a warm amber that bleeds between each rib and throws thin lines of shadow onto the floor below. It’s the kind of light that changes a room’s entire temperature without a dimmer switch.

The floor lamps take this further by stacking two of these oval forms vertically, separated by a collar of small hand-strung beads, pale or dark depending on the colorway. The overall silhouette is monumental and a little totemic, tall enough to feel architectural, grounded enough to feel domestic. A round marble disc sits at the very base, and a dark wooden platform separates the stone from the lantern body above it. At the top, a small ceramic collar and a brass arch handle, finished with a hand-knotted rope loop, completes the form. Each of those transitions between materials is considered. Nothing gaps. Nothing looks like an afterthought.

The table lamps are a single lantern body on the same layered base construction: marble cylinder, wooden disc, ceramic ring, all stacked in sequence before the lantern begins. Seen in the cooler, dark photography with light on, the table lamp version becomes something else entirely. The fabric blazes orange-amber, the ribs define themselves sharply, and the base grounds it with the coolness of stone and lacquered wood. The contrast between the glowing body and the inert base is the design’s central tension, and it holds.

The color palette is restrained and precise. Pale pink Huo and terra cotta Tu are the named hues for the Lotus Charm floor lantern, but the full collection also includes a deep chocolate brown and an off-white cream that reads almost bone in natural light. These aren’t trendy colors. They’re earth tones in the truest sense, rooted in the Wu Xing framework of the five elements that informs the studio’s design philosophy. The naming isn’t decorative. It’s structural.

The pendant lamp is worth separate attention because it behaves differently from everything else in the collection. Rather than the soft oval, it takes a compressed diamond shape, wider at the middle and tapering to neat points at top and bottom. The fabric is a much darker, denser weave, almost charcoal, so the light it produces is intimate and filtered rather than openly warm. A brass U-shaped arch suspends it with a clean, modern hardware logic that sits at an interesting remove from the more ornate treatment of the floor lamps. It’s the cooler, quieter cousin in the room, and it earns its place.

Nine artisans contribute to each piece, working across bamboo, lacquer, natural dyeing, stone, porcelain, and Chinese knotting. That number shows. Not in any busy or demonstrative way, but in the specific quality of objects where every transition between materials is resolved and every surface has been touched with purpose. In a design market that rewards speed and volume, that level of attention to a single object is increasingly rare, and immediately perceptible. Taiwan-Lantern’s collection isn’t trying to reinvent the lamp. It’s trying to make one that’s worth keeping.

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An Iranian Villa Built Around Architecture’s Oldest Shape

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The gabled roof is one of the oldest tricks in architecture’s playbook. Pitched, familiar, and about as dramatic as a grammar school diagram, it’s the shape children draw when they first sketch a house. But Alireza Taghaboni of Tehran-based Next Office has done something rare with it: he made it interesting again.

The Gable Villa, completed in 2025 in Royan, a coastal city in northern Iran, is the kind of project that looks obvious at first glance and quietly revelatory the longer you sit with it. Royan sits near the Caspian Sea, and like much of Iran’s northern region, its traditional architecture has always leaned into the pitched roof as a direct response to heavy seasonal rainfall. This isn’t a decorative choice or a nostalgic one. It’s climate-driven, practical, and centuries old. What Taghaboni does is take that deeply familiar slope and push it into conversation with the hard orthogonal language of contemporary architecture, and the result is genuinely compelling.

Designer: Next Office–Alireza Taghaboni (photos by Ehsan Ahani)

The design concept is built around hybridization: an inclined structure, reminiscent of the region’s vernacular buildings, fused with a right-angled framework. On paper, that might sound like an architectural compromise, the kind of thing that slides into awkward pastiche. It doesn’t. The collision of the two forms creates interior spaces that feel both grounded and unexpected. The inclined volume doesn’t just define the exterior silhouette; it reshapes the interior experience entirely. Rooms feel taller where the ridge runs and more intimate where the slope pulls low, creating a natural hierarchy of space without needing extra walls to do the organizing. The geometry does the emotional heavy lifting.

Next Office, which Taghaboni founded in 2009, has built its reputation on exactly this kind of thinking. The studio’s work consistently returns to one core tension: how do you build something deeply contemporary in a country with one of the most layered architectural traditions on the planet? The Sharifi-ha House, perhaps the firm’s most internationally recognized project, explored flexibility and movement through rotating rooms that could open or close depending on the season. The Gable Villa is quieter than that, less theatrical, but no less considered. It’s a more mature move, one that doesn’t need to show its mechanism to make its point.

What strikes me about the Gable Villa is how unapologetically local it is. At a time when globalized architecture tends to iron out regional character in favor of a universally recognizable aesthetic, this project leans hard into where it is. Royan’s vernacular DNA isn’t applied as surface decoration; it’s baked into the structural logic of the building itself. That’s a meaningful distinction. Taghaboni isn’t borrowing visual language from tradition, he’s inheriting the reasoning behind it and rewriting it in a contemporary register.

The photography by Ehsan Ahani captures the project with a stillness that suits it. The villa simply isn’t competing for attention. It sits in its landscape with a kind of confidence that comes from knowing exactly what it is and what it’s trying to do. The light plays differently across the gabled form than it would over a flat roof, and you feel that in the images even before you fully process why.

For anyone who follows contemporary architecture, the Gable Villa is a reminder of why regional architecture, done with intelligence and rigor, still carries a weight that purely international work sometimes loses. Architecture has spent decades flattening itself into a single global style, and you can feel the cost of that. It’s also a reminder that the most familiar forms, the gable, the pitched roof, the shape of the house your four-year-old self drew with a crayon, still hold enormous untapped potential in the right hands.

Taghaboni and Next Office are clearly worth watching. Not because they’re doing the loudest work, but because they’re doing work that rewards attention. The Gable Villa is exactly that kind of building: patient, purposeful, and quietly smarter than it looks.

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RedMagic’s Power Bank Has a ‘Flight Mode’ Button To Meet New Airlines Regulations

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Aviation rules around lithium batteries are a moving target, and the power bank seems to be the latest casualty. 10 years ago, power banks weren’t a problem on flights but now suddenly they’re a hazard everywhere, whether it’s your check-in luggage or your hand-carry. Most power bank manufacturers have treated this as someone else’s problem. RedMagic apparently decided it was worth a dedicated hardware button, and the Deuterium Power Card Pro is the result.

Built around a 25W wireless charging pad and a 45W wired output in a slim metal alloy chassis, the Power Card Pro also carries an H21 honeycomb-engraved aluminum body, a rectangular status display, and AI-assisted thermal management that RedMagic claims keeps surface temperatures in check during wireless charging. The one-touch flight mode cuts wireless transmission instantly, a feature small enough to overlook in a spec sheet and practical enough to matter the moment you actually need it at gate 34B with a boarding group breathing down your neck.

Designer: RedMagic

The design language here is unmistakably RedMagic. The H21 honeycomb pattern engraved into the anodized aerospace aluminum gives it a texture that reads as premium without trying too hard, and the chamfered 60-degree edges make it comfortable to actually hold rather than just nice to photograph. The Chinese character for deuterium stamped across the back ties it visually to the broader Deuterium accessory line, which RedMagic has been building out alongside its gaming phones and tablets. This isn’t a standalone product thrown together for a product launch cycle. It’s a piece of a larger ecosystem, and the design reflects that coherence.

The rectangular status display is a small but meaningful upgrade over the single LED dot indicators that most power banks still ship with in 2026, telling you exactly how much battery your power bank has left. Paired with the AI thermal monitoring, which RedMagic says manages a five-layer heat dissipation system in real time, the Power Card Pro is positioning itself as a power bank you can actually trust to make decisions intelligently rather than one that just dumps watts into your device and hopes for the best.

The 5,000 and 10,000 mAh capacity options keep the form factor choices honest. The 5,000 mAh variant will top up most modern smartphones once with room to spare, while the 10,000 mAh version is the one frequent travelers will actually want. Pricing and a firm release date for China are still pending, so how aggressively RedMagic intends to compete in what is already a crowded premium power bank segment remains to be seen. The feature set suggests they’re serious. The honeycomb aluminum suggests they want you to leave it on your desk even when you’re not traveling.

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