Experts share design tips for apartments as small as 290 square feet

By Nicolas Milon

Located on Paris's Quai de Valmy, overlooking the Canal Saint-Martin, this flat's design was very busy, according to Meghedi Simonian and Houssam Kanaan, founders of Kann Design, when they acquired it. "We didn't fall in love with it right away, that's for sure. It was well decorated, but nothing like what it is now", they confide with amusement. "We did, however, fall in love with the location. Having lived in the area for a long time, we knew this building from 1980 very well." It took a lot of imagination on the part of the couple to embrace the project and decide they were going to redo everything from closing off a bedroom to simplifying the kitchen. The apartment's circulation was one of the few things that didn't need to be reimagined as everything was already rational and efficient.

By Nivedita Jayaram Pawar

By Bindu Gopal Rao

By Avantika Shankar

The real surprise is in the materials the designers used. After the walls were stripped and the parquet flooring was removed, Simonian and Kanaan discovered an interesting concrete-and-gravel floor that they decided to keep. "With the pebbles incorporated into the concrete, it's not a terrazzo floor, but we liked the stone element, especially as there is radiant floor heating", the designers say. The same goes for the walls, also in concrete, which continue the stone motif that the couple wanted from the outset of the project. They like the contrast between their rough appearance and the custom furniture that they designed specifically for the apartment.

"We wanted a dialogue between stone and wood. Okoume [an African hardwood] is used in the living room and the two bedrooms, where the full-height storage units have wooden handles in simple vertical lines." They match the fronts of the low cupboards in the kitchen as well as the cabinets in the bathroom, where they have a different finish, however. The couple chose to repeat lines and materials, right down to the furniture, with a single model of chair found throughout the apartment from the dining room to the children's bedroom. The only exceptions are a Charles Pollock armchair in the principal bedroom and a Serener chair in the children's bedroom. "We both like simple things, and there's an elegance in modest forms."

"It was an essentially untouched flat intended as a rental investment", says Cyrielle Benaïm of Bän Architecture. "The original plan was a bit complicated and restricted but it offered the possibilities of creating either a two- or three-bedroom apartment." The owner chose a two-bedroom-plus for a single remote worker, including a designated office space. Benaïm moved the kitchen to the living room to make it more convivial, and then created an office in the former kitchen. The new central part of the flat incorporates a bathroom, accessible from both the bedroom and the hallway, and a study, which opens onto the bedroom thanks to a glass window above the desk. The new arrangement facilitates circulation and allows natural light into the office.

By Nivedita Jayaram Pawar

By Bindu Gopal Rao

By Avantika Shankar

In the new living space, Benaïm enhanced the early 20th-century cornices and a bow window that give the place its personality. "We’re surrounded by the foliage of the trees on the avenue, so we had to open up the living room and invite the outside in through the bow window, which is so rare in this type of space." The walls in the flat have a number of recesses, and the architect took advantage of one of these to create a dining area with a rounded bench. The cornices that were preserved when certain partitions were removed are showcased, creating spectacular ceilings that recall the old floor plan. The kitchen, with its abundance of storage space, is the antithesis of the ones found in many small flats. It's increasingly important to owners to be able to cook and entertain and the island separates the kitchen without closing it off, while at the same time providing a work surface.

As the flat is intended to be rented out, the owners chose a mostly neutral palette: white walls, bleached oak parquet flooring, and grey oak laminate kitchen units dominate, with touches of yellow in the dining area and pink in the bedroom—it's "a neutral shade that's more interesting than grey" Benaïm says, and it complements the ecru bedside tables and the black used for the desk. "It's important to engage with the dark side of corridors and other spaces with little light, using dark paints to create contrasts and shape the space. They add a graphic touch that goes hand in hand with this almost, but not exactly, open-plan room." In the bathroom, terrazzo-effect tiles and brass accents highlight the white Corian washbasin.

By Nivedita Jayaram Pawar

By Bindu Gopal Rao

By Avantika Shankar

For this attic flat, which is accessed by a small internal spiral staircase, the designer had to create a number of rooms within a truly narrow space based on the owner's wish list: a bedroom, a living room, an office/library, a relatively large kitchen (relative to the size of the apartment), and a bathroom. "The first issue is that there was very little light, so we added a bay window on one side", explains interior designer Delphine Maumot. "Then, as the space is very narrow and long, we added an alcove with a protected cocoon feel." The goal was to achieve a feeling of spaciousness despite the atypical layout of this 600-square-foot flat on two levels, with the entrance and the bottom of the lacquered metal staircase on one level, and the living space above it. Everything was custom-made and designed with curves to add as much roundness and softness as possible to counterbalance the apartment's convoluted layout.

A long piece of built-in furniture forms the link between the successive spaces, crossing the flat from the bedroom to the kitchen and incorporating a sofa and storage units before turning into a desk. This strong visual element establishes a through line—a unifying ribbon of light oak running the length of the space, which evokes the interior of a yacht. The arched doorways are a nod to the previous layout and continue the maritime metaphor. The two rounded arches opposite the staircase create a sense of symmetry and perspective when viewed from the sofa.

By Nivedita Jayaram Pawar

By Bindu Gopal Rao

By Avantika Shankar

"It was my first home and my first investment," says young architect Marco Vieira of his single-storey garden level studio. "I carried out the work with a partner on a DIY basis, which saved me a lot of money and was a good opportunity for me to better understand the construction process that follows the design phase." In retrospect, it's easy to see the scale of the task: to combine a shed and a garage into a single flat with only a few openings—several windows and a front door. The unit's north-facing position meant the shadows cast by the surrounding buildings presented challenges as did the facts that all work was going to be carried out by only two people and the only access for tools and materials was through a door that is less than two feet wide.

Vieira was not intimidated by the challenge of accommodating a kitchen, a shower, and a separate bedroom in two rooms with a total area of 290 square feet. His goal was to separate the different spaces without closing them off—part of why he retained the change in level between the living room and kitchen. He also created a wardrobe/cupboard unit to divide the bedroom from the living room, without having it reach the ceiling. "I created two alcoves, a private one for the bedroom and a more open one for the dining area," Vieira says.

As far as the openings are concerned, he positioned the windows high up in the bedroom, shower, and kitchen, allowing light to enter the apartment while still providing privacy. In the kitchen, the window also provides some low-tech ventilation. In the dining room and living room, a fixed wooden element creates a geometry reminiscent of the Maison Louis Carré designed by Alvar Aalto, who also worked with horizontal window compositions. An electric shutter has its motor recessed into the façade, as Vieira pays attention to in the smallest of aesthetic details.

By Nivedita Jayaram Pawar

By Bindu Gopal Rao

By Avantika Shankar

Architect and designer Martin Massé was asked to completely redesign the flat of a painter in the Condorcet district of Paris's ninth arrondissement. His aim was to open up the apartment's different spaces, while reimagining its distribution, the partitions between rooms, and the location of the bathrooms. Only one element was untouchable, the load-bearing wall containing the building's chimney flues. "We decided to use the large room at the back for the living room, dining room, and kitchen—all in an open plan—with the kitchen positioned along the left-hand wall, using low cabinets to avoid it becoming an overly imposing presence in the living room." Large storage units are integrated into the walls, and a long line of wooden elements opens up the space while hiding their functions as much as possible.

Paradoxically, the first space visitors encounter in this new organisation becomes the sleeping area. To minimize the feeling of having to cross the bedroom to get to the living room, the architect designed a desk with shelves that create a space that is half passageway and half office, serving to screen off the bed. The shelves and their rounded ends are a slightly updated evocation of Art Deco, with cream-coloured lacquer paired with stained oak—the same combination found in the kitchen area. In his choice of materials, Massé favours quality over quantity, and by pairing wood and waxed concrete in both places, a theme carries over from one room to the other. In the kitchen, the backsplash and a shelf are made of waxed concrete, which can also be found in a strip along the floor in front of the stained oak cabinets. "The impression I was attempting to create is that of waxed concrete rising up the wall," Massé explains.

By Nivedita Jayaram Pawar

By Bindu Gopal Rao

By Avantika Shankar

This flat, with its many windows either reflecting or offering views of Paris's Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, was too compartmentalised and needed to be redesigned to open up the space. "The owner, in his 30s, wanted to give priority to the living area," explain Noa Peer and Flore Raimbault, the architects who founded OUI. Living alone, he wanted to be able to host his relatives with a real bed rather than fold-out sofa when they visited. A person with minimalist tastes, he was mainly looking for a large living room and a certain flexibility in the overall organization. After several different designs, he settled on the one that most appealed to him: a simplified plan, with three niches housing the foyer, the kitchen, and shelving with various objects. All three follow the same green-blue colour scheme and have floors with very small-format white mosaic tiles.

At the far end of the flat is the sleeping and bathroom area, separated by a sliding door and treated as an open-plan suite divided into four areas: a dressing room, utility room, shower, and the bedroom. The bedroom has been given an original treatment, making it the second highlight of the project. With the bed raised on a platform, the space is a contemporary reinterpretation of a boat's cabin, with furnishings reduced to the bare minimum but incorporating storage units everywhere, under the bed and headboard and in shelves and niches made of light-coloured plywood.

An octagonal porthole acts as a window. It and the terrazzo flooring throughout are reminders of the ocean-liner aesthetics popular when the building was constructed, in 1930. The terrazzo also serves to unify and enlarge the space as it engages with the small, matt black mosaic wall that runs from the bedroom to the shower. There's little variety in the materials used in the apartment, though a ribbed-glass wall along the toilet provides privacy without blocking light.

By Nivedita Jayaram Pawar

By Bindu Gopal Rao

By Avantika Shankar

In a 1900s factory converted into apartments, this loft occupies the fourth and top floor. The height under the vaulted ceiling, supported by imposing metal beams, is an impressive 13 feet. "It may seem gigantic at first but divided into two halves of just over 6 feet each, as is the case here, it's a bit tight. You need some Escher-style architectural games to get around this problem as it creates some interesting but complex spaces," confides interior architect and designer Elisabeth Hertzfeld, who had to deal with a cube bathed in light that is fascinating at first glance, but when divided into several smaller spaces becomes a complicated mixture of lines, vaults, beams, and partitions. "I asked myself, ‘How can we get back to that first impression when you think that it's just a big, beautiful, and luminous presence?’" She started with the wall of glass that floods the space with light but then divided into squares, crosspieces, and uprights, echoing the angular architecture of the apartment's library.

In the midst of these straight lines, Hertzfeld added a touch of roundness with a large, soft, supple curtain that breaks up the rectangles with its undulations and covers the bookcase in a wide arc also enveloping the sofa while drawing attention away from the bookcase. Although it serves an important need for storage, the monumental bookcase that extends into the kitchen, "must be able to disappear as if by magic so that we find a more zen space," Herzfeld says.

The different spaces are so interconnected that you can see them all at once while maple wood was used to create a fluid continuity throughout the apartment. The luminosity and grain of the wood are matched by the whiteness of the floors, the curtains, and the lacquered furniture, as well as the greenish-bronze grey of the waxed concrete in the credenza, the windows, the metal beams, and even the glass tiles in the bathroom (in a lighter shade).

By Nivedita Jayaram Pawar

By Bindu Gopal Rao

By Avantika Shankar

"In the pedestrians-only Montorgueil district [in Paris's first arrondissement], this small space is a real gem", says Laura Markman, architect and founder of Atelier Noun. "I based my renovation on the soothing atmosphere of its tree-lined courtyard." It's a jewel, to be sure, but a tarnished and date one that didn't reflect its neighbourhood. Markman decided to wipe the slate clean, open everything up, and start over from scratch—almost. She first decided to focus on the concept of a mezzanine as the best way to expand the space and create room for various functions—kitchen, sleeping area, storage, laundry room, and others—then turned her attention to the three south-facing windows and rethought the layout in terms of volume and luminosity. She describes her focus as, "how to get as much light as possible to the end of the flat."

She placed the bathroom in a back corner of the studio, where a small window provides natural ventilation. Once that space had been defined, she installed a mezzanine sleeping module in the centre of the freed-up space in front of it, standing "like a monument" in her words. Several different functions take place around and inside it, including a dressing room and the corridor leading to the bathroom from the entry to the apartment. Next to the sleeping area, the living room face the apartment's windows.

The light wood sleeping unit includes an integrated storage area under the bed, running alongside a stone wall in the apartment. On the side facing the living room, two steps leading up to the bed can be stored one under the other. They can also serve as a seat and a small desk or mobile console as required. Cabinet doors that conceal a TV also act as a divider and provides privacy in the sleeping area, while other doors open onto additional storage. In the bathroom, a small door gives access to the washing machine, located under the bed, concentrating the wet functions in this part of the flat and assuring that every last inch of space is used.