Tiny houses in the Wendland

The Wendland is the district of Lüchow-Dannenberg, the north-eastern tip of Lower Saxony. The Elbe forms its northern and eastern edge, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg lie across the river and the old border, and for forty years the whole area sat in the shadow of the inner-German border. That isolation is why it looks the way it does: around Lüchow more than a hundred round villages (Rundlinge) survive, horseshoes of half-timbered farmhouses with their gables turned to a central green, and the open-air museum in Lübeln shows how they worked. Along the river the Lower Saxon Elbe Valley biosphere reserve stretches from Schnackenburg past Dannenberg to Hitzacker, a small half-timbered town on an island between the Elbe and the Jeetzel. In autumn cranes rest on the floodplain meadows by the thousand.

Tiny houses here are a small, recent addition rather than a scene. On the edge of Gartow, a few minutes from the lake and the pine woods of the Gartow forest, a village of five tiny houses of 35 m² each takes two guests apiece, with terraces and a shared yard. Outside Lüchow, in the hamlet of Untergut, a renovated one-bedroom house of 50 m² stands in its own garden with a terrace. Most other rentals in the district are apartments in converted farmhouses. The Elbe Cycle Route runs along the whole river edge, canoes can be hired on the Jeetzel at Lüchow, and around Whitsun the Kulturelle Landpartie opens studios and barns across the villages.