As much as New Yorkers love cramming into tiny apartments stacked on top of each other, our cozy closet-sized living spaces get a bad rap. People think we live like sardines, use our stoves for storage, and sleep on our sofas in the kitchen. But they would be wrong. What people don’t realize is that we don’t live in small spaces because we have to, but because we want to. We know that with a little ingenuity and a lot of creativity, it’s easy to make a 500 square foot studio feel like a 1,000 square foot two-bedroom apartment.
One of my favorite small apartments is this tiny East Village studio apartment that Jordan Parnass Digital Architecture transformed into a one bedroom loft. Near the front half of the space, JPDA built an amazing wood paneled central station that supports a lofted bedroom area and contains the kitchen, bathroom and lots of storage space. The wooden hub immediately separate the studio into three different zones. Fixtures are built directly into the walls, and storage space is tucked in underused spaces, like in each stair leading up to the lofted bed.
But even for some, 400 square feet is a luxury. Take Zach Motl‘s 178 square foot Clinton Hill studio. The interior designer, a collector since he was a child, fit all of his knick knacks, books, and magazines into his one room apartment by artfully arranging the objects. By using different colors, materials, and grouping his furniture together, he managed to created a bedroom, an office, and a living room — all in less than 200 square feet. The apartment has a very DIY -feel, as Motl did everything himself, from building the counter/front-end table to covering the kitchen walls with planking.