Miniaturized Lives

Nathan Hurst, writing for Wired, reports on San Fransisco’s latest foray into the trend of micro-apartments:

If you live in San Francisco, chances are you already feel like you’re living in a closet. But soon the city’s smallest living spaces will likely be tiny enough to fit in a compact one-car garage.

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors tentatively approved Tuesday a trial run of 220-square-foot “micro-apartments” — carefully designed compact living spaces that have become all the rage in urban development. Pending ratification and mayoral approval next month, the plan beats, in smallness, Vancouver’s 226-square-foot “micro-lofts,” and make the 275-square-foot units under trial in New York look like airplane hangars.

I am somewhat ambivalent about this trend. On the one hand, providing affordable places to live for individuals without the need for a roommate seems good. On the other hand, cramming as many people as possible into increasingly smaller spaces seems like a recipe for trouble (the terrible tenements of industrial cities comes to mind). What it comes down to, for me, is an issue of quality. If done well, I can see a segment of the population enjoying them.

Doing micro-apartments well is a tough task. As with gadgets, small is easy but miniature is hard. It takes a lot of work and careful planning to make 220 sf livable. The smaller the space, the less you can rely on furniture. For these micro-apartments to actually work, I’d expect an almost turnkey solution with lots of built-in amenities that may even feature some clever space saving design elements - things like Murphy beds that flip up to reveal a table or desk, sliding walls to flexibly divide space, and well integrated storage. I would expect the cost per square foot of micro-apartments to be higher than more typical apartments due to the increased complexity of additional design, detailing, and construction. There is a cost to doing miniature well. It remains to be seen if the market exists for these miniature apartments.