Tenement House, Glasgow

I found out about Agnes Toward and her home, Tenement House, Glasgow, now a museum, in Rick Ball's Spacecraft: Design for Compact Living on page 14. This led me to the museum's website, and most fortunately for those of us who have not had a chance to visit Glasgow yet, here a short video that gives us a glimpse into the museum:

When you look on google maps, you can see the museum is very close to the Cowcaddens Subway Station in the Glasgow SPT (Strathclyde Partnership for Transport). Interesting is when you read about the Glasgow Subway online, you learn and can see that the carriages and tracks are smaller than what most of us are probably used to. So even though Ms. Toward's home is not a microunit, it might still be a cool trip to combine the experience of the small carriages of the Glasgow Subway with taking in an example of a relatively small flat and how people lived in it. 

Hotel Grace Platform Bed

I thought this raised platform bed with storage for luggage underneath was fantastic and clever maximization of available space! It is a picture from the Hotel Grace in New York. It would be a wonderful setup for living in any small space.

Double Decker/Stacked Seating/Use of Vertical Space!

I thought these images by Jacob Innovations were fantastic inspiration of thinking about use of vertical space! The designer's name is Emile Jacob.

Giuseppe Pica's 300 Square Feet

The cool thing about this apartment is that it manages to display lots of art pieces, both sculptures and paintings, effectively, yet in a small space (300SF). The guitar and the lightbulb both seem to be art sculptures that provide lighting also.

The storage bed has fluourescent lights underneath, making it look like it floats. =)


I love his kitchen most of all. The giant screwdriver is whimsical, and the yellow of its handle plays off the yellow tractor seat stool.

He uses Lucite, and is on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Little House in the City has blogged about his apartment too. It won an award from Apartment Therapy in 2007. And the NYTimes was the first to cover his flat.

Michael Kolendowicz's Awesome Customization and Carpentry Skills

I wish I had has carpentry skills. It looks like he made that hanging lamp too. He was featured in this NYTimes article. He went to RISD Rhode Island School of Design.

Awesome 175sf studio in NYMagazine

535 West 110th Street 175-square-foot studio. Asking price: $195,000. Maintenance: $170 per month. Brokers: Steven O. Goldschmidt and Sarah Smith, Warburg Realty.
Floor plan by Jason Lee.

(Photo: Courtesy of the broker)

When they began converting 535 West 110th Street to a co-op earlier this year, the building’s sponsors decided to gut the top floor, where the maids’ rooms used to be, and carve one- and two-bedroom apartments out of it. They built three, and had 175 square feet left over. “We didn’t know what to do with it, so we made it the best smallest apartment ever,” says listing broker Steven O. Goldschmidt of Warburg Realty. They called it the “micro-studio.” It’s ten by fourteen feet, plus a bathroom; if you were to bring in a queen-size bed, which would take up nearly 20 percent of the room, there’d be just enough space for a dresser, a chair, and a couple of end tables.

Pricing it proved difficult: How to value such an odd space in a relatively top-shelf building? Goldschmidt ended up putting it on the market at an ambitious $195,000, or more than $1,000 per square foot, and after some negotiation, he found his buyer. Aside from one other penthouse, this is the only unit in the building that’s sold, entering into contract for $150,000 as August began. (Two other, and needless to say larger, penthouses await.) “I priced it that way figuring, Let’s give it a shot,” says Goldschmidt, who says the buyer—an auditor for a multinational corporation who needed a pied-à-terre—had been spending a fortune on hotel rooms in the city.

The place has its quirks, even beyond its size. To reach the apartment, the new owner has to exit the elevator one floor below and take a separate flight of stairs. But no matter: The roundabout approach, plus the views of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine nearby, echoes a Parisian garret in which she once stayed. Apparently, she remembers it fondly.

http://nymag.com/realestate/vu/2009/09/59211/

In the April 2007 Domino Magazine pp 150-155.