This Light-Bending Micro Apartment Will Make You Look Twice

When a couple in their 40s tasked Miogui Architecture with turning a 137-square-foot Parisian apartment into a flexible live/work space, the firm focused on scale, sunlight, and geometry. "Before our intervention, the bathroom and the kitchen were too large for the size of the apartment, and the bathroom had very little natural light," says founding partner Léo Berastegui.

The apartment, located in Paris’s 20th arrondissement, is one of many compact units in a 1930s building that was once a hotel. "The neighborhood is a popular district close to the Père Lachaise cemetery and the Gambetta subway station," says founding partner Sabine Fremiot.

The duo began by knocking down the apartment’s existing walls and relocating the bathroom and the kitchen so that the two adjacent rooms would form one large triangle. "This created more space for the living room, and more natural light for both the living room and the bathroom," Berastegui says. "We gave a window to the living area to make the space look and feel bigger."

They sectioned the kitchen from the rest of the apartment by hanging pale blue drapes that can be pulled back to connect the space to the living area. "The curtain also makes the kitchen disappear during office time," Fremiot says.