Paris

April 17, 2015April 17, 2015

Awesome French Micro Apartment is Awesome

Continuing on yesterday’s theme of creative adaptations of existing spaces is this apartment by French architect Cyril Rheims. The space, designed for a young student, measures only 301 sq ft but contains a number of clever features.

Before the renovation, the space was pretty unprepossessing, and its walls, which meet at a variety of off angles, would seem like a challenge to work with.

Rheims cleared the space then built custom furnishings into the walls, save for a couple sitting cubes, a sofa and a birdcage. These built in furnishings include a retracting breakfast bar over the dishwasher, a cantilevered bed “cocoon” and a number of storage elements. The odd angles, coupled with the grey, quasi-metallic palette, create an overall effect that is reminiscent of Voltron (it’s an architectural term). But in a good way.

via Living in a Shoebox

April 8, 2015

Tiny Apartment Merges Transforming Design with Organic Style

There’s a tendency for tiny transforming apartments to feel like they’ve been designed by Optimus Prime. Often when you add furniture that folds into the wall, it’s hard for an interior to not have a futuristic, modern vibe. Which is why interior decorator Geraldine Laferte’s tiny “Duhesme” apartment is so successful–it merges transforming furniture with a warm, organic style.

The Parisian apartment measures a mere 193 sq ft, yet features a dining area, kitchen, lounge, desk, bed and bathroom. Laferte uses a mixture of warm woods and muted wallpaper to keep the place feeling anything but cold and futuristic. The transforming elements include a wall bed that sits above a built in sofa and there’s a small dining area with a table that folds into the wall when not in use; three cube-shaped stools serve as seating. The whole space is lined with floor to ceiling cabinetry to maximize storage.

October 31, 2014September 21, 2016

Only Thing Tiny Apartment Lacks is Clever Description

Okay, it might not be as small as last week’s 75 sq ft Roman sliver of an apartment, but at a mere 86 sq ft, this Parisian flat still qualifies as ultra-tiny. Amazingly, like its continental cousin, the place is full featured, including sleeping, cooking, bathing and storage capabilities.

The space is located in a classic Haussmann building and was originally used as a maid’s quarter–a type of flat known for its small, spartan qualities. The client wanted to ready the space for an au pair. Kitoko Studio designed the space so all of its functions stow away in a volume of floor-to-ceiling cabinetry. A single bed is hidden inside an upper cabinet and accessed via a stepped cabinet that slides out from underneath. A dining table/desk with stools hooked underneath pulls out of another cabinet. A wardrobe and storage shelves slides out from another. There is also a wet shower and small kitchen with pullout cooktop, microwave and sink.

The clever and clean approach to the apartment’d design give it way more utility and style than such a small space would normally possess. And while the skinny nature of the apartment has an overall claustrophobic feel in my opinion (hey, it is 86 sq ft), I could see this as a completely reasonable place to live for a while, especially if your life is not centered at home.

Via Designboom

May 27, 2014

Très Petite Maison Parisienne

The stereotypical profile of someone living in a 129 sq ft apartment is a person who might have trouble putting together enough scratch to afford ramen noodles. Therefore the idea that he or she could pull off a tasteful and smart renovation is nearly unthinkable. We talk here a lot about this phenomenon: how small spaces tend to get marginalized because many of the people who live in them might not have the resources to give their spaces the design love they deserve. So we are quick to point out exceptions like this tiny (12 sq m/129 sq ft) Parisian flat designed by Julie Nabucet Architecture.

The main feature of the space is a raised platform that holds a trundle bed. When extended halfway, the bed also acts as a sofa. There is a clever drawer built into the platform stair that holds pillows (an oft-overlooked detail with many hiding beds).

Stacked wooden boxes separate the kitchen from the living room and act as storage–these make a lot of sense, though we suspect they’re not stable enough to use as a counter. There is a bunch of built-in storage along the room’s main wall.

The small kitchen has a two burner cooktop and a small convection/microwave oven (everything is kinda small actually). The bathroom sink is separated by a lattice plywood divider that creates some separation without closing off the space; the proximity of the bathroom sink to the kitchen keeps the two sinks on the same plumbing line.

Like many tiny spaces, this apartment’s main feature is its central location in the Montorgueil quarter. In her interview with Fair Companies, Nabucet talks about how Parisians tend to live outside, which makes big private spaces unnecessary. With a little bit of design, this apartment is a nice demonstration that your urban launchpad can be as attractive as it is functional.

May 5, 2014

Parisian Architects Give Client the Shaft

What do you do with a space that’s tall, skinny and only has light coming from its roof? That’s the question Marc Sirvin and Clémence Eliard of Agence SML set out to answer with Alban Diner’s 28 ft, shaft-like Parisian apartment.

Amazingly, Sirvin and Eliard fit four levels and 25 sq m (269 sq ft) of floorspace into the tiny space. Natural light, which only comes from skylights on the roof, is able to diffuse because of open-grid steel floors as well as skinny and steep welded steel stairs that create in minimal visual impedance.

Each floor is a room: the basement is the bathroom, the the ground level is the kitchen/living room, the second floor is the home office and a small lofted third floor holds the bed. The trip from bed to bathroom down skinny steps would seem to be a perilous one, though in the video above, Diner seems pretty relaxed about it all.

While it’s hard to argue that this apartment is the most practical of layouts, we’re impressed they’ve done anything with this difficult space. Nothing is more edited than using, and making usable, something that would otherwise go to waste.

Via Fair Companies and Arch Daily

July 17, 2013May 26, 2015

Très Chic Parisian Micro Digs

While Japan might be the nation most associated with micro living, the French hold their own in terms packing big design in small spaces. Case in point are BioApparts I and II, a pair of Parisian micro-apartments designed by Karawitz Architecture. BioAppart I is 193 sq ft and BioAppart II is 172 sq ft; they were designed for client Esther Baumann and meant as prototypes for a replicable rental properties.

As the “bio” prefix implies, there was a heavy emphasis placed on making the apartments as earth-and-human-friendly as possible. Here’s are some of the features Karawitz included in BioAppart I:

[The] cabling is “shielded” for the elimination of magnetic fields, lights and taps are energy saving. The attic is insulated with hemp, the remaining walls and the ceiling are painted with emission-free bio-friendly paint. All the furniture is of solid timber construction, with birchwood veneers. The bathroom and kitchen are finished in cement stucco, based on the Moroccan “tadelakt” technique, in order to provide a surface finish which is waterproof. The little most of the Bioappart: a “living” wall with a clay finish that absorbs or releases humidity according to the hygrometry of the room, it can also diffuse essential oils.

Both apartments feature very high quality looking finishes and elegant, minimalist designs. One of the great things about small spaces is that even when you opt for high quality materials, the reduction of area needed to remodel keeps costs manageable. The price of a full renovation on BioAppart I was reported to be $57K.

If you like the BioApparts and you’re in Paris, it looks like you can rent them out. Though we couldn’t find either BioApparts I or II, Baumann appears to have a few other places for rent around Paris that look pretty swell too.

Photos by: Mischa Witzmann

June 17, 2013July 11, 2013

Would You Live in an Idea?

We ran across this stunning little Parisian apartment in Arch Daily. The level of detail and design that architecture firm Betillon Dorval-Bory brings to the 215 sq ft (20 sqm) space is remarkable. Yet there is more to this tiny space than meets the eye (or rather your eye brings more to the space).

The apartment, dubbed “Appartement Spectral”, is a study in light. In order to compensate for a dearth of natural light (a point we’re not sure we’d agree on), BDB decided to play around with different types of artificial lights. One side of the apartment is lit by low-pressure sodium lights and the other florescent. Each type of light has a different color rendering index (CRI). “The CRI of a light describes its ability to reflect accurate color of a surface,” according to BDB.

The low-pressure sodium lights, which are the same orange lights you see illuminating cities when you’re in an airplane, have a very low CRI, which means everything ends up monochromatic and the same orangey hue of the light. These lights are relegated to the bathing and sleeping areas where BDB thought distinguishing color was not as critical.

The florescent lights have a very high CRI and thereby render all reflected colors near perfectly. These lights were placed in the living and kitchen areas where color distinction is more useful.

In terms of how the sparse interior and light play off one another, BDB says this:

The apartment is designed in a simple and neutral expression, without color or particular detail, annihilating any architectural expressiveness or narrative to leave only the logic of composition generated by light.

The apartment is pretty gorgeous in our opinion, but we do wonder what it would be like to live in. In terms of sterility, this place makes the LifeEdited apartment look like a music festival porta-potty–it’s whiter than white. And as interesting as the theory is behind the lighting, we’re not sure how it makes the space more livable necessarily.

Of course our questions are a bit silly. This is not an apartment for just anyone. This is a tiny aesthetic wonderland and, for the right esthete, this would make a perfect home.

via Arch Daily

Photo credit: Betillon Dorval-Bory

June 4, 2012July 17, 2013

Parisian Apartment Presents Micro Luxury Living

We’ve looked at some pretty small apartments in the past, and while it can be inspiring to see folks occupying such a small footprint, it’s not always an aesthetic treat. Wired Magazine recently looked at a Parisian apartment that is both compact and comely.

Thibaut Ménard’s 130 sq ft Montparnasse apartment is micro-luxury at its best. Architects Marc Baillargeon and Julie Nabucet built the space–once a master bedroom in a Haussmann multi-story building–with the detail normally reserved for larger, luxury units. They also included a number of innovative small-space solutions like a staircase storage unit that rolls away to create more space; a sliding bed that, when pulled out halfway, serves as a couch; and a split-level layout that stores the bed and gives the space more dimension.

Oftentimes, tiny spaces are associated with worst-case-scenarios; the story goes that someone was so down on his/her luck that he/she had to move into a 130 sq ft apartment. Ménard’s apartment and many others are presenting small living as an active choice, where spaces are optimally designed, not cobbled together with whatever is lying around.

If you know of other tiny homes with big design, let us know.

Images and story via Wired