If you’re like me, you watch this video and think “my house is 10 times as big as this apartment and only slightly more functional,” and then curse the day you moved to the suburbs.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwz0xewTS0I]
This is the smallest studio apartment you can build in California, by law — 160 square feet — and it includes a bevy of space-saving measures.
The decor includes a “smart bench,” whose middle leaf levitates on a pole to transform it into a small dining room table and chairs for two. The couch transforms into a queen-size bed. The ceilings are a generous nine feet tall and the front door is an 8.5-foot solid slab of bamboo.
The housing developer behind this project, Patrick Kennedy, says this was an effort to prototype a kind of living space that might be suitable for the 42 percent of San Franciscans who live alone. It cost a couple hundred grand to build, but that’s because everything in it is experimental, from the solar tube that lets light into the bathroom to the “appliance cabinet” that hides your toaster oven so you don’t have to feel like you’re in your kitchen when you’re sitting in what should be your living room.
