Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/29/tour-of-a-cool-300-square-foo.html
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This trend is taking off in many of the stupidly expensive cities around the world. There is a heritage apartment building next door to us with five 300 square foot apartments plus 20 larger units. These small units rent for over $1K CDN plus mandatory insurance and utilities.
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It struck me that there may be limited headroom passing under that steel beam, but the video didn’t show that clearly. Tall visitors need to watch out for that.
But where does one put all their clutter? Asking for friend…
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In a 200 sq ft storage space at the far end of the commuter rail line.
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Because we all have the wherewithal to remove a load bearing wall.
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The only place to sit in the flat that looks even remotely comfortable is the office chair. Even the bed is just some kind of lightweight low-density foam, supported by a super-hard deck base of triple-layer Baltic birch plywood. I kept hoping I’d get a glimpse of a big-old overstuffed recliner hidden from view for the tour.
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This is where this trend leads to:
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There’s nothing wrong with small apartments/tiny houses like this one per se, but until housing stops being seen primarily as an investment rather than as a place to live, that trend is going to continue in any large, desirable city on the planet.
I somehow doubt that the landlords of the apartment building near you put a small fraction of the thought into designing their 300sqf apartments that this professional architect did with his.
For reference, he said it cost at least USD$35k (AU$50k) to do the entire renovation (with him doing the architectural design work for himself). So yeah, not exactly the kind of scratch most people (especially most young architects) have sitting around. I’d assume that he factored it into his purchase of the entire unit as an alternative to buying a larger one.
I’ll bet his neighbours weren’t expecting a reno of that scale in their complex, either.
Agreed. I don’t necessarily think the smaller space in and of itself has to be a sacrifice, but if one is going in that direction it’s worth investing in comfortable and durable furniture.
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I tried looking at the photos in this link but my heart started racing.
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I own a 133 sq. ft (12.4 m^2) flat that was formerly used as military housing, and honestly I wouldn’t need a bigger one 
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I lived in a 400sqft apartment and honestly i hated it
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Great, I’ll take one. Let me burn down what I’m living in now.
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I just moved into a small apartment in Melbourne. My clutter is still at my ex’s house 
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Thats fabulously cheap by Melbourne standards. The last renovatiuon I did was almost 20 years ago and that cost 150 kAUD.
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I’ve watched a bunch of shows from this series, the project costs they give almost always beggar belief. I suspect that they are getting labor and possibly materials at cost from industry friends.
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On the tiny home theme, I quite liked this one that I ran across recently:
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I toured a few new condo buildings with very small apartments in San Francisco. My sense was that the target market was people who already have a normal sized place and want a pied a terre, vacation condo, or even airbnb investment. But because developers have incentive from the city to alleviate the housing crisis, they pretend that these are units for people to actually live in.
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Since this guy is an architect, you may be right. When asked about how much the reno cost he says somewhere between AU$50-80k, which is a wide range. Paying full retail and including architect’s fees, the real cost would be closers to @Michael_R_Smith’s figure.
As I recall, the last tiny house featured on BB showed a couple who lived in one that they built on the wife’s parents’ property. I believe the wife’s father was also in the construction biz. It seems to take a lot of financial and social capital to build a pleasant tiny house.
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It certainly is. I can understand such a big interval on an estimate, but such imprecision after the fact would make me leery to hire him on a job.
My house was designed and built by a young architect for his own use; he had friends do much of the construction, and many of the fitments were leftovers from commercial jobs. We’ve had to redo quite a bit of the work over the years to bring it up to my own quality standards.
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