Who Are You Calling a Tiny House?

For more than a decade, I lived in a 375-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn. It wasn’t the cute "tiny house" you see on an HGTV show or in an endless wash of TikTok videos. It was, well, a small apartment that my partner and I made into a more than livable home. The Covid pandemic led to dueling Zoom calls in tight quarters, prompting an acute need for us to eventually size up, but I learned a lot about taking stock of how much space you really require—even if the answer is a bit more of it.

The small spaces in this issue all ask a similar question: What is the right amount of space for how you want to live? Each answers it in much less than the roughly 2,411 average square feet of a newly built American home. But they’re also not self-consciously minuscule or filled with elaborate, gimmicky custom built-ins. They don’t show people performing feats of extreme downsizing. Rather, they meet the needs of their residents with economy, intention, and creativity.

Take the structure housing a set of his-and-hers offices in a Seattle backyard. With minimal square footage, it resolves the very modern conundrum of how to work from home without always being in your home—or on top of your partner. Other examples are more extreme. On a tiny lot in Osaka, Japan, hemmed in by neighboring buildings, a family of five built a tall, skinny house with fluid living spaces spiraling vertically around a narrow atrium capped by a large skylight. The result looks bigger than its 868 square feet. Other examples are just fun: Who doesn’t want to spend some time in a floating sauna or a dome in the woods?

Apartments in particular often present a challenge when it comes to organizing an interior, and in this issue we visit a few historical examples for inspiration. The first was designed by no less a duo than Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. An available apartment in their 1932 Immeuble Clarté—considered an antecedent of the multifamily masterwork Unité d’habitation in Marseille—was enough to prompt a Belgian couple to pick up and move to Geneva. Meanwhile, Maria Bottero has stayed put. She has lived in the same Milan apartment designed by her former husband, architect Umberto Riva, since 1969, and two photographers recently published a book showing the interior for the first time in more than 50 years. We also visit a recently renovated maid’s quarters in the storied Belnord apartment building in Manhattan, completed in 1909; you might know it as the Arconia in Only Murders in the Building.