Five hundred square feet. Now a city life that fits inside it.
She is a chef, he is a retired Coast Guard officer turned photojournalist, and they cook, entertain, and host constantly. All of that had to happen inside five hundred square feet, in a co-op with the coordination that comes with close neighbours.
They wanted to work, entertain, relax, sleep, and store, without compromise, in a footprint most people would call a studio.
The question they arrived with was whether all of it could fit, and whether the work required to make it fit could be approved.
Two side walls carry the kitchen, the dishwasher, the refrigerator, the television, closet storage, and a king Murphy bed. A rear wall consolidates the bathroom, the entry vestibule, a prep area, and the reclaimed mid-century overhead cabinets.
The island sits in the middle and does the social work. Four independent lighting layers let the same room feel different by time of day.
And a fragment of the building's original kitchen, salvaged and repainted its own red, which ended up driving the entire colour scheme.
The clients describe it as a Swiss Army knife. The bed folds away and the living room returns. The high-gloss cabinet faces double as a whiteboard for working at home.
They can now live in the city and the country both, which was the actual point.
A permanent bed claiming the room around the clock. Now a Murphy bed that disappears, and an island that does not.
The building's own nineteen-sixties cabinets, still red, still in place. Everything else in the room was built to answer to them.
Same red, same doors, a different wall to answer to. Walnut behind them now, and nothing else competing for attention.
Big Little Living: Renovation Makes the Most of 500 Square Feet. The article sets the work against Chloethiel Woodard Smith’s Harbour Square and the case for reinventing overlooked efficiency units.
By Louis Duva · ArchitectureDC, p.50
Wondering whether a smaller place could actually work?
Five hundred square feet held an office, a kitchen, a dinner party, and a bedroom. The trick was never the size.
Read how one room does four jobs →Rather talk it through? Start with one question.
"The red cabinets were already here. Keeping them was not nostalgia, it was the colour scheme."Luis Boza · On salvage as a design decision
