10 Cases of Incredibly Small Spaces

In the developed world, when it comes to our homes, conventional wisdom dictates bigger is better. But why? So we can spend years slaving away to pay off a mortgage for a house that may not appreciate in value? And then go further into debt furnishing and maintaining it, all the while saddling the planet with an environmental impact grossly out of proportion to our needs?

And that’s if we can afford, or even find, the room. For much of the developing world, living space is at such a premium people spend ridiculous sums of money to live in quarters smaller than some prison cells. And they, too, slave away to keep even that. Submitted for your approval are 10 cases of living in small spaces, some ingenious and enlightened, others not.

10 Little House in Toronto

Smaller living may be coming into fashion, but it’s definitely not a new idea. Sandwiched between two normal-sized neighbors, the Little House is the smallest home in Toronto, Canada. The land on which the house sits was originally designed as an alley for one of the neighboring homes. City officials never approved the curb cut, so in 1912, contractor Arthur Weeden decided to make use of the land and built a house on it (in which he and his wife lived for 20 years).

With only 312 sq. ft. of space, the Little House is a neighborhood favorite, and stops traffic from time to time. American celebrity Ellen Degeneres was so won over by its charms, she expressed interest in one day owning it. An engaging and detailed history of the home can be found at The Little House Website.

9 Videré

Located in the heart of Seattle, WA, Videré is a rooming house that’s getting big by going small. The rooms in the complex range from 90 to 168 sq. ft. The smaller units are only slightly larger than a parking spot.

Each apartment consists of a single room and a small attached bathroom. The units are furnished and cable-ready, but without a private kitchen—each of the complex’s six units share a communal kitchen on the first floor. Rent is between $500 and $700 per month, with all utilities and Internet service included. Jim Potter, a partner in Videre says the target clientele is “young people, who don’t do much more than sleep in their apartments. (They) have a living room somewhere else.”

8 Best Smallest Apartment

In 2009, developers converted New York’s 535 W. 110th Street building to a co-op. They gutted the top floor and carved out three decently sized one- and two-bedroom apartments, but ended up with 175 sq.ft. left over. They didn’t know what to do with the unused space, so they decided to make the “best smallest apartment ever”.
The resulting “micro-studio” is 10 x 14 feet, with modern conveniences and a private bathroom. A queen-size bed would take up 20 percent of the entire living space. The flat is not without its quirks, either—to reach the front door, the tenant must exit the elevator one floor below and ascend a separate flight of stairs. The current owner paid $150,000 and uses the apartment as a premium pied-à-terre while in New York (thus saving a fortune in hotel costs).

7 Narrowest House

With no formal architectural training, Brazilian Heneita Minho designed, and still lives in, what many recognize as the narrowest house in the world. Her three-story home is a svelte 1 meter wide by 10 meters tall. It’s so thin she cannot fully extend her arms when she walks in the front door.

Despite its radical appearance, the building is a fully functioning home with 2 living rooms, a kitchen, 3 bedrooms with washrooms, and a verandah. At first, city officials sought to block construction, but relented when the original plans were revised to a more conservative design. The house has since become a minor tourist attraction.

6 Smallest Apartment in the US

Felice Cohen is a professional organizer, and she’d better be. That’s because she’s living in what many say is America’s smallest apartment. Her whole life must fit into a 90 sq. ft. flat, with no kitchen and a loft bed in which the ceiling is less than 2 feet from her face. The bathroom is so small she sits on the toilet sideways, and she had a panic attack the first night she slept in the apartment.

So why does she suffer these indignities? The appeal is a mix of economy and location. The former Bronx resident pays just $700 a month to live in New York’s tony Upper West Side—Central Park and Lincoln Center are just blocks away. Her neighbors pay $3,000 a month for the same location. Cohen attributes her extreme frugality to her father, whom she remembered in ‘What Papa Told Me’.

5 Tumbling Tumbleweed

Jay Shafer is the creator and resident of what he claims is the smallest house in the world, affectionately named ‘Tumbleweed’. His decision to live in just 96 sq. ft. arose from his concerns about the environmental impact of a single person living in a larger house.

Shafer’s entire home is smaller than a typical bathroom, but is still wired for electricity powered either by an AC plug or via a solar electric system with an inverter. It has a two-burner stove, an under-counter refrigerator, a bar sink, on-demand hot water heater, and a propane room heater.

Tumbleweed is very well insulated, making it a dream to heat and cool. In fact, Shafer spent less than $170 to heat his tiny house during the brutal Iowa winter. He now sells plans for, and builds, tiny homes from 50 to 500 sq. ft., all available for purchase from his website, Tumbleweed Houses.

4 Domestic Transformer

Life in Hong Kong can be cramped and hostile, and nobody knows that better than architect Gary Chang. So he transformed his tiny one-room apartment (which once housed his whole family and a renter) into an innovative, eco-friendly space that can transform into 24 different configurations. Spatial flexibility is achieved through the multiple operations of clever partitions.

Mr. Chang hopes his home’s innovations can improve domestic life in Hong Kong, where the population grew by 500,000 in the last 10 years. Reports of child, spousal and elder abuse have doubled recently, and social workers attribute this rise, in part, due to social pressures caused by the city’s ongoing space shortage.

3 The Egg

In Beijing, affordable housing is hard to find, if you weren’t already born in it. Dai Haifei, 24, learned this after landing a job at a Beijing architectural firm after college. Unable to afford rent, he built a tiny egg-shaped mobile house and parked it on the sidewalk outside his office.

The 2 meter tall egg cost 6400 Yuan ($960 US) to build, and was made of bamboo strips, waterproof materials and sacks stuffed with processed wood shavings. Grass seeds covered the exterior walls and roof. It even had a window for natural light and solar panels to generate electricity. Inside were a single bed, a bookcase and a pressurized water tank for hygiene and sanitation.

Living in the egg was easy, since Dai built it to perfectly suit his needs: he worked until midnight each day and returned to the egg only to sleep or relax. A nearby gym provided shower facilities, and he ate at nearby restaurants. Neighbors were impressed with the young man’s ingenuity, diligence, and green construction methods.

Sadly, on December 1, 2010 the Haidian District Urban Management Division decreed that any roadside building without a permit is considered an “unauthorized construction” and must be removed. Two days later, nearby restaurant employees noticed office personnel moving the egg at 8 p.m (while Dai was working). Dai wouldn’t comment except to say that he would sleep at a friend’s house that night.

2 Capsule Apartments v3.0

Originally built for the urban poor, “capsule apartments” are a new alternative for Chinese singles desperate for affordable urban housing. The first versions (top: that’s TWO units, not one) were barely larger than a closet, had a chain-link ceiling, offered 2 square meters of space, and cost 230 Yuan a month. For that the tenant got a single twin-size bed and a wall shelf. Pictures of the apartments hit the Internet, and embarrassed officials destroyed the flats for violating a hastily drafted regulation for a minimum 10 square meters for personal living space.

Original architect Huang Rixin (retired) has now returned with Capsule Apartment 3.0 (bottom), which meets the new code and costs only 200 Yuan a month, easily within reach of people with monthly incomes of only 1,500 – 2,000 Yuan. The new apartments cost only 3,000 Yuan to build, with costs dropping substantially when mass produced. Mr. Huang has repeatedly stated he has no commercial interest in the capsule apartments, and only wants to provide affordable housing for the next generation.

1 Roman Holiday

The recognized smallest apartment in the Western world is a former porter’s closet in the heart of Rome, offering a mere 55 sq. ft of living space. The flat consists of a ground floor bathroom, shower and sink. A ladder grants access to a sleeping platform just large enough for a single twin-size bed. The tenant must climb over the bed to see out a small window.

The apartment is generously described as a “compact bedsit”, and the leasing agent claims several serious inquiries. The appeal is location: the flat is very near the Piazza di Sant’ Ignazio, a gorgeous city square overlooked by a Renaissance cathedral. Just a block away is the Palazzo Grazioli, the current mansion/private residence of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.

And it can all be yours for 50,000 Euros. It helps if you don’t think of how many capsule apartments that could buy.

A Ghost Story - Dangerous Ouija Board Spirits

It was days before Halloween the year was 1968, you could just feel the creepiness in the air. Being 11 years old, Halloween was still fun, if not more fun the year before because I was allowed to stay out a bit later without the watchful eye of my parents. Besides, back in those days we didn't have to worry too much about strangers and receiving razor blades in apples, basically we had the run of the neighborhood and knew everyone and looked forward to this time all year long. 

My father was working late this one October night. It was day light saving time as the sky grew dark early. My mother was visiting a neighbor up the street who always offered her a highball when she visited, my mother never refused an alcoholic beverage. 

The woman she was visiting had just lost her husband a month before and so she drank too much then called anyone in the neighborhood and cried about her problems, my mother happened to be the lucky recipient of her call that night. She told my sister and I she would be back in a little while, she was off to help Nancy out. We had already eaten dinner and were feeling a bit spunky with no adult supervision and got bored quickly with the house empty. 

My sister Bonnie was a tom boy, always looking out for bugs, rodents, stray dogs and birds that fell out of their nest, hoping to bring them home to make as a pet. My father never let her keep anything, so they did not get along too well. My mother was the sucker for Bonnie's impulses, she always let her keep her finds, but they had to be well hidden up from my dad, because if her found them, he would make her set them free and yell at her because he wasn't going to pay to feed any animal, well except his small dog Peppy.

Halloween was in the air, things seemed more spooky, with the sky gone dark, peoples houses were decorated with the scary pumpkin faces on their stairs and sheets hanging from on top the porches made to look like ghosts blowing in the wind. 

It was too early to settle down and watch TV, besides no one was in the house to give us directions on what to do, so being kids we decided to take full advantage of this situation and go run around outside. My Mother was 5 doors up and so we did a sneak peek through the house she was in, spying on her and listening to her conversation through the mail box in the door, slowly we would lift it up and could see them talking, sitting on the sofa with their cocktails and yakking. 

We couldn't hear much and what we heard was boring, so we took off back down the street.. running and giggling about being able to spy on our mother and her friend. All of the sudden Bonnie came to a halt, out of the corner of her eye she spotted something dark flapping around on another neighbors lawn.

She gasped. "Linda look at this!" What is it?" I said back. Her voice had excitement as she came closer for inspection I could hear her gasp again saying "Oh my God, I think it's a bat!" She was all too excited with her find. A bat! I thought, how spooky to find one days before Halloween, I knew the stories about rabies and bats so I was cautious about approaching any closer and allowing Bonnie to do what she does best, which is rescuing hurt, weird animals. 

She called out with urgency "Go get something I can put it in!" I said back "Like what?" I didn't want to go looking all around for something on an errand for her. "Go get a bucket or something I can use, something with a lid or some sort of top, and would you hurry up!" She said loudly back to me.

I took off running across the street to our house, looking frantically for something to put a stupid bat in, I was really more excited then I let on. Finding a bat at Halloween time, what were the chances and what possibly could it all mean? It was eerie weird feeling I had inside. 

Frantically looking around I finely came on an old Halloween bucket that we used last year, it was faded from leaving it in the sun all year it closely resembled a fade dirty ice cream container. Bonnie kept her turtle in this container until it died, "this will have to do", I thought. I snatched it up and came running back to where Bonnie was. She quickly snatched it away from me, taking the lid from the bucket she put the bucket upside down on top of the bat then with the lid she scooted it inside, quickly flipping it over and securing the lid on, she stood up with a grin as wide as one of the pumpkins on one of the porches we were near. She could not be happier with her odd pet find. 

We both ran back home wanting to see it in some light Bonnie commented on the way that she wanted to bring it to school the next day to show everyone.. I got was afraid of it, I worried but not letting on to Bonnie how scared I was.. I thought "Could it get out in our house and then we would then have a bat somewhere hiding and waiting for us to fall asleep so it could bite our neck and drink our blood?.. Oh no way I thought, I'm out of here. SO I took off outside where I was safe from the latent vampire... I ran as fast as I could up to were my mother was and furiously banged on Nancy's door.. Nancy answered the door and I say " I want my Mom" Jumping up and down with excitement, before she ever got a chance to say anything.. She looked over at my mother and said "your wanted at the door my dear". 

My mother approached the door with an unpleasant look on her face, and said "What do you want?" I said in a hurried voice with as much excitement an 11 year old could muster up and blurted out " Mom Bonnie found a bat on Carmen's lawn she has it in the house. I was out of breath and panting, when my mother said, Sorry Nancy but I guess I better go see what the hell is going on over there. 

I think the reason why my mother always sided with Bonnie when it came to her strange obsession with creatures is because she was once like how Bonnie is now.. She seemed to be just as excited as Bonnie was. On our walk down the street, my mother said something that sort of scared me and made my mind start thinking.. She said "Finding a bat just before Halloween, this must be an omen". What's an Omen? Why did she look funny when she said it? I remembered that word from scary movies like Rosemary's baby and others, all I knew is it wasn't a good term used everyday. My mother was always saying things that scare me, she wasn't like other mothers I knew, she had certain physic powers of sort, she would always have dreams that came true and not to mention all the times I tried to lie to her and she would wake up the next day telling me what her dreams told her and how she knew I lied because of her dreams. She had always been in the occults, her mother likewise, raised all her children to believe in them too. My grandmother used to conduct séances with my mother and her twin sister present, she used to scare me with her stories. 

The scariest story she ever told me was when she was sleeping one night after she was married and woke up all of the sudden and saw woman standing at the foot of her bed. The woman was dressed like someone from the Victorian era with a long empire dress on and her dark brown hair in a Gibson style bun on top of her head.. It scared my mother so bad that it went away. The next morning she called her mother and told her what happened and described the woman to (my grandmother) and she said "From the way you described her, I think you saw my Mother!" "She was probably trying to tell you something, so next time she comes to you don't be afraid, just listen to her and what she has to say, it must have been important!" This is something I never wanted to experience, never, never, never do I want to see a dead person at the foot of my bed in the middle of the night.. So night time was scariest for me in fear of seeing something like my mother saw.

My mother opened the door to find Bonnie kneeling on the floor with an ice pick in her hands poking a hole in the top of the plastic bucket so the bat could breath. Mom said to Bonnie, "You know Bonnie with bats it could be very dangerous, so don't touch it whatever you do." Bonnie smiled from ear to ear staring at it through the see through plastic lid with holes in it. My mother once again commented on how odd it was to find a bat at Halloween time. Bonnie was proud because no other kid on the block had a bat at Halloween time she could not stop grinning. 

After carefully considering the situation, my mother told Bonnie she could only keep it over night in the basement then she must take it to the hills behind our house and let it go. Not only could it have rabies, because it's out of it's normal patter of flying at night, it might be injured and die and could bite you if you get too close and who knew if it had lice either. So Bonnie agreed to let it go in the morning, and headed to the basement when there was a knock at the door. 

The knock scared us because the house had gone silent for a few moments when Bonnie was about to pick up the bat taking it to the basement. It was my friend Crystal coming to play, she had a Ouija board in her hands, it gave me the creeps just looking at it, with all the weird lettering on it. My mother said, "Oh Crystal what you got there?" Then told us to be careful because it's not a toy. Even my mother the physic and someone familiar with the occults was weary of the Ouija board. Bonnie was downstairs playing with her new pet, who knows what she was up to down there probably finding a good spot to hide it from my father. Crystal and I took the board into the kitchen while my mother turned on the TV and quietly smoked her cigarettes while we played. 

Crystal set it on the table and started off telling me how to hold on to the disc, and said we need to ask it questions and then it will answer us. So crystal started out first asking it questions, stupid ones like, "What was I in another life?" The Ouija would answer back. "You were a needle in Gods eye!" I thought Crystal was moving it because it seemed to move in such an easy way, but she swore she wasn't. So next it was my turn. OK I will ask the same, " What was I in the life before?" "You were a nail in God hand", it answered" Shoot it keeps saying the same stuff I said". OK, lets try something else. OK "What boy's do I like?" It answered back, "GO TO HELL! Crystal laughed, and said, "OK who will I marry?" It said back, "You will marry the devil." I didn't like this board it was starting to scare me, because no matter what question we asked it said something not so nice. 

We continued.. I asked the stupidest question of them all, "Is there a spirit in our house now?" It did something that shocked us both.. It started pointing rapidly back and forth to each letter, bam bam bam one after another until all the letter in a row spelled out "WEREHERE" It took us a few moments to figure out what it said and when we did see what it was we both got scared and let out a girlie scream. My mother shouted back to us to keep it down. But we continued to ask it more. "What were the name's of the spirits in the house?" Spelling out words, and names we could not understand. Then again I asked it, "where did you come from?" It spelled out "HELLWHEREYOURGOING." We let out another small scream then stopped ourselves by placing our hands over our mouth so my mother wouldn't hear us. This time my mother got up to see what was going on, she said all of the sudden she had a bad feeling come over her and wanted us to stop it now. Too late, Crystal asked something else. Quickly my mother grabbed a pen and paper next to the phone in the kitchen, seeing how fast it was going she wanted to know what it was saying and then proceeded to record the letters it was forming... Now this time the board was faster then ever and it seemed like we no longer had control over what it was saying or doing. For a minute I thought, If I were to let go, it would move by it's self. That's how thick the stench of fear was in that room, even my mother was feeling uneasy and frightened as she jotted down each letter it spelled out. 

"WEREHEREANDWEWONTLEAVENOW" My mother wrote as fast as the pointer pointed to the letter, then it started using swear words one after another until my Mother loudly screamed at us, "TAKE YOUR HANDS OFF IT NOW!" It was frightening! You could feel the cold chill, and the look on my mothers face was more frightening as she separated the letters making sense of the long word. We begged her to tell us what it said. "WE ARE HERE AND WE WONT LEAVE NOW" she read it to us, as we both looked at each other and got teary eyes with fright. Looking at my mother I could see her fear too, which caused me to panic even more. 

Just then we heard Boom Boom Boom Boom, coming up the back stairs. We all turned towards the back door frightened as to what or who it was running up the back stairs, it was Bonnie aggressively swinging open the back of the kitchen. She was frightened and had a look on her face that described it all. She was almost about to cry, running over to my mother she said gasping for breath with white-ish colored lips! "Something touched me downstairs" she said as her bottom lip was quivered, then something slapped my back, no ones down there mom, and something slapped my back!"

My mother gasped! Lifting her shirt, she could see the red mark on her back! Bonnie, still in shock said "and I heard a voice say something," then she started to cry full blown not being able to get out what she heard. We were about to pee our pants hearing this, OH MY GOD I moaned with an uneasy sick feeling inside my stomach. My mother said "What did it say Bonnie?" She was determined to get it out of her but in a calm fashion as to not scare us. Bonnie, nuzzling her face in my mothers chest, then cried more just thinking about it. She uttered while still crying, "It said, You hate your mother!" 

My mother comforted us by telling us "It's OK!" Nothing is going to happen, but this is enough! "That's it," she said, "Crystal put that thing on the coffee table and don't forget to take it home with you! You three go outside for a few minutes, to cool down and just play! It's going to be all right, just go get some fresh air." Crystal placed the Ouija board on the coffee table as instructed, and my mother was walking to the bathroom. Bonnie and I followed closely behind Crystal. I was touching the door after Bonnie went through, ready to pass through the open door myself last, when all of the sudden something from the corner of my eye went flying across the front room and went swishing by my mother then crashing on the bedroom floor next to the bathroom. 

My mother shouted out, "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?" I couldn't believe I SAW SOMETHING FLY THROUGH THE HOUSE SO FAST! I couldn't even tell what it was but we all heard it crash. My mother came running out of the bathroom thinking we threw something and we all three swore it was none of us that did anything. She turned on the light in the bedroom to see what it was that hit the so hard that it left a nick in the hardwood floor. 

"What was on the table next to the Ouija Board" she said? Then spotting it under the bed she said "Oh My God, this is interesting!" It was her camera, she left laying on the coffee table that was right next to the Ouija board Crystal laid down. The camera had been broken with such force she knew none of us could have done that. It was mostly made of metal and plastic but was broken into a lot of pieces. She quickly grabbed the film that had been exposed and commented how she would take it to the pharmacy in the morning and try to get the film developed and see if there was anything on it. Crystal was told she needed to go home and to never bring that thing back to our house again by my mother. 

Bonnie and I were shaken up over this ordeal and I'm sure that walk home for Crystal was one she will never forget. Walking home in the dark, with a spooky Ouija board in her arm that had caused so much trouble in one household.

Halloween night while Bonnie and I were out trick or treating we saw a bat fly overhead, making this the most frightening Halloween in our life. Who is to say, if it was the bat Bonnie found or not checking up on us or in some way showing us that we now opened the door to evil in our home and in our lives. 

A week later the film was developed and the pictures that came out were that of a hazy black figure on a smoky like horse that looked very spooky. My mother said "never again we will have a Ouija board in the house." 

That Halloween was the creepiest I had ever experienced with the black bat and the Ouija Board. I have never had any desire to play with another one since, and raising my own four children I would never allow them to play with such a dangerous tool letting something happen to them like it to did to us that Spooky Halloween. There were many sleepless night in that house after that occurrence. 

As adults all us children would bring up that happening and explore the different things we experienced in that house. Like being alone in a room and all of the sudden something overcomes you with such a fright you have to run fast as you can to get away! Or the feeling of being watched. Even my father, years later, who is nothing but a hard nosed skeptic and realist commented on hearing voices and feeling something poke him in his ribs one night while down there in the basement. 

One never knows who or what is waiting behind those doors, waiting for a chance to come into your life and your home to take up permanent residence with you, watching you, touching you, whispering in your ear when your not aware of their presence. Once that door is open it can never be closed, once you have crossed the line into their dimension.

How about u??

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