An apartment roughly the same size as the coffin you'll be buried in
August 24, 2016 1:32 AM Subscribe

IKEA's 2017 Catalog Is A Terrifying Glimpse Into The Tiny Apartments Of The Future
posted by acb (170 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite

Perhaps IKEA took its inspiration from a Brazilian drug lord.
posted by Conway at 1:43 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

As I perched glamorously on my EKENÄSET, languidly paging through the new catalogue, I was mainly struck by the obnoxious preponderance of grey this season.

The size of the mocked-up apartments is refreshing by comparison to the sort of airy open space galleries of architectural masturbation fantasies for suburbanites with urban dreams that is usually the standard, to be honest.
posted by sonascope at 2:13 AM on August 24, 2016 [38 favorites]

I like IKEA so much. I live in a tiny flat and I am glad tiny flats are being built so people like my kid who wants to live in this particular city will have a chance to have a comfortable home in an ever-crowded city. Ikea means I have a reasonable couch and beds and bookshelves and they don't gouge people with hire purchases like the other working class furniture manufacturers.

Tiny apartments are reality already for so many cities. I flipped through that snarky article and went oh hey - that dishwasher I have to get rid of, instead of shelves from IKEA, I could put a drawer freezer there like they did with a fridge instead! That would be so awesome, if I can get the measurements right. And a tiny apartment means people aren't forced to live with their families instead but can move into their own place nearby in the same city.

And thankfully that awful orange is GONE. They're doing a lot of greys and bamboo at the moment.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 2:38 AM on August 24, 2016 [40 favorites]

I can't really tell from these pictures, but it all sure looks spacious and comfortable enough. (More spacious than our apartment.) In actual square meters, how big are these "microapartments" supposed to be?
posted by pracowity at 2:45 AM on August 24, 2016 [12 favorites]

The backlash against the McMansion backlash has begun?
posted by mary8nne at 2:46 AM on August 24, 2016 [7 favorites]

From a European perspective all of this looks entirely sensible and helpful.
posted by melisande at 2:48 AM on August 24, 2016 [77 favorites]

Looking to buy in the UK and in my experience anything built before the 1980s is probably smaller than the apartments pictured. I think its not that houses and apartments are getting much smaller than say the 1950s but that we all have loads more "stuff" to stuff into them.
posted by mary8nne at 2:52 AM on August 24, 2016 [8 favorites]

These places look amazingly empty and spacious compared to any places I've known. Every surface should be covered in boxes and boxes of dog-eared stuff that's not been unpacked since the last rent-hike induced move.
posted by grahamparks at 2:57 AM on August 24, 2016 [23 favorites]

These all look like my flat in London (which is considered generously sized) where I live today, not The Future.
posted by like_neon at 3:01 AM on August 24, 2016 [5 favorites]

I don't know from Ikea, but I'd love having one of those apartments instead of the place I have now. So not all of us are joining in on the tiny living space backlash.
posted by gusottertrout at 3:02 AM on August 24, 2016

MetaFilter: architectural masturbation fantasies for suburbanites
posted by oheso at 3:14 AM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

Really loved being able to fully renovate my 850 sq foot house with 11 new pieces of furniture earlier this year for only $1500. There's so much more free space in every room now, it's incredible. And it looks pretty nice.
posted by oceanjesse at 3:26 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

There must be some place that has furniture for cramped apartments, but that's tasteful and built to last a bit longer. Our "mansion" is a bit less cramped than some of those photos. oheso.SO had it done by a designer when she got the place a bit more than a decade ago, and it's all black and chrome, imported from Germany. She says we're not doing that again -- with age, the black fades and the chrome pits.
posted by oheso at 3:39 AM on August 24, 2016

Having just recently gone to an IKEA to buy likely furniture to renovate my old camper I can say Ikea's commitment to tiny multiuse furniture is vastly overstated in this article. Show me an IKEA dining room that turns into a bed and we'll talk.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 3:43 AM on August 24, 2016 [5 favorites]

Aargh. This is relevant to my interests in a slightly horrible way. I'm contemplating a move from Sheffield back to London for a much more interesting job and, frankly, life. But accommodation in Sheffield is hilariously cheap compared to London, and I'm dreading the thought of moving from my swanky, big (by British-city-centre standards) flat back to a crummy shoebox that's at least an hour's sweaty commute from work. Just looking at those photos makes me feel claustrophobic.
posted by metaBugs at 3:45 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

They overstate their case, though the guy with no kitchen but plenty of "denim cubbies" was hilarious.
posted by AndrewInDC at 3:51 AM on August 24, 2016 [17 favorites]

Yeah, another one chiming in with "whoa, massive apartments". In my first bedsit in London you could reach both the fridge and bathroom door from the bed.
posted by fatfrank at 4:15 AM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

Those look like huge spaces to me! Mr and Mrs Conifer, 3 year old Conifer Jr, and 8 month old Conifer Jr Jr live in 34.5 m2 (about 373 sq ft). It does feel cramped sometimes, but it's not a tiny tiny apartment by the standards of Barcelona.
My sister and her family (one more kid than me) live in a house that's 14 times larger. It feels like a giant cavern when we visit, but oh, to have an office of my own where I could close the door, just for five minutes!
posted by conifer at 4:17 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

The average UK house is getting smaller- with less and smaller rooms. UK new builds are the smallest in Western Europe,probably because there are no minimum standards.
posted by threetwentytwo at 4:17 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

A casualty of this is not being to curate your space, filling it with artefacts of your personality and outlook; books, records, souvenirs from travels, and such. Instead, the microapartment generation will have to make do with stickers on social-media apps and Spotify playlists. (In the age of the post-Long Siege mass-surveillance state, this will also have the benefit of ensuring that these aspects of people's personalities are visible to the surveillance apparatus, in case they flag someone as being of interest. After all, we don't want the security services to go dark on tchotkes, do we?)
posted by acb at 4:29 AM on August 24, 2016 [7 favorites]

The dead can't pay rent. If apartments are coffin-sized, you're getting cremated. Or eaten :)
posted by mr_book at 4:30 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm not anti-tiny spaces, but I am anti-'let's store stuff way high out of reach of even the tall models in the photo'..... sorry 'bout that; short-person rant over now.
posted by easily confused at 4:33 AM on August 24, 2016 [15 favorites]

But People living in tiny apartments need cute flat-packing furniture too!
posted by forkisbetter at 4:40 AM on August 24, 2016

This article is a little too bougie for me. Why is it so outrageous to sit on the floor to eat or to have a vanity in the bedroom instead of the bathroom?

There's nothing terrifying about this to me. I grew up in generic apartment rentals in the US that seem to have rooms roughly the same size as the rooms pictured in the catalogue. Now I live in the UK in an apartment that is 460 square feet. There's enough room. The kitchen is a bit small but it's adequate for my partner and myself. (I am inclined to agree with easily confused though. Some of our shelves are too high for 5'2 me so my partner has to be called into the kitchen every so often if I need something that's too high up.)

This flat is just not something that I would classify as a tiny space, and I have a feeling that a lot of my American friends would call this a tiny space because they live in a place (Washington State) where space in homes is expected to be abundant.

I've also seen apartment listings for cities like London which are ridiculous and are basically glorified shoeboxes. Those are tiny spaces, and I guess this is all part of a larger conversation about growing populations and where people are supposed to live.
posted by quadrant seasons at 4:41 AM on August 24, 2016 [8 favorites]

I do love some of the small space design, but I can never seem to make it work - probably because I do have lots of books and knick knacks and some stuffed animals of great emotional significance. need to have design that takes that into account.

also: one person who sews and one who knits. we need yarn & fabric storage, preferably high up and closed against moths.
posted by jb at 4:42 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

The average UK house is getting smaller- with less and smaller rooms.

This. It should be obvious when you stop to consider the number of terraces of town houses that've been turned into three to six flats each.

Also, the people who wrote that article should try visiting Hong Kong sometime. Your London bedsits are downright roomy by HK standards. Unsurprisingly, IKEA is (or at least was ten years ago) hugely popular.
posted by Dysk at 4:43 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

If any of the apartments shown in this article are under 500 sq ft (the same square footage as my smallish, if not exactly tiny apartment) I'd be very surprised.
posted by Strange Interlude at 4:47 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

Okay but what the heck is with that chair mounted up on the wall near the ceiling, you guys? Why? WHY?
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:47 AM on August 24, 2016

The thing that always gets me with IKEA backlash is that I want to just raise an eyebrow, tap these feverish blogistas on the shoulder in the midst of their fits of inspired haw-haw, and point out that the people who create these scenarios don't actually expect you to buy these things and recreate these rooms by rote like the hallowed disciples of Sverige. The purpose, in fact, and it's something IKEA does very, very well, is more to say "Here's a set of ingredients, and here's something we made from them. Try to find your own way."

I live in one of those coffins that people from the outer sprawl and the inner wealthholds love to revile—a long, narrow apartment of a bit over five hundred square feet that's essentially just two medium-sized rooms, three closets, a four by eight foot bathroom, and a five by nine foot luxury kitchenette with zero countertop space—and I've been here for twenty-eight years of methodical fine-tuning.

A pair of IVAR shelves packed with bossa nova records occupy the corner of a room with a sturdy system of IKEA rack-mounted shelves up the center wall, between the windows that open to the street, on which resides a collection of vintage Danish stereo equipment, a gorgeously 1966 Japanese copy of a Grundig shortwave, and car parts from a DKW 3=6, hanging over a beat-up walnut table that belonged to a seamstress and is marked with iron burns and the dashed trails of a marking wheel darkened by years of oiling.

A huge and utterly worthless Victorian parlor organ perches heavily in pride of place in the room, good for nothing but as a place to hold houseplants and photographs and as the punchline of a sophisticated dick joke in which I ask new visitors if they'd like to see my enormous organ, which naturally holds vases of plastic tulips, because daisies on a piano are nice, but tulips on one's enormous organ are better, and it's inexplicably packed full of wigs and vintage gas station attendants' coveralls like the worst Russell Edson poem ever.

Two IKEA-hacked storage cabinet stools with custom orange vinyl tops store my dog medicines and sewing paraphenalia, and the insanely gorgeous and fantastically bijou EKENÄSET sofa my family unexpectedly bought me for Christmas in 2014 sits around the corner from a hanging Balinese winged goddess, a large collection of original text artworks by the not-nearly-known-well-enough Davi Det Hompson hanging across the little halllet from the dark wood folk art bookshelf built for my grandmother shortly after she was born in 1899.

In the back room, where I sleep and work, a giant Grundig Locarno shortwave combination hi-fi console perches on pointed wooden legs, complementing a broad mid-century dresser with matching finish and pointed wooden legs that, naturally, I don't use for clothing because dressers are obsolete idiot furniture for vulgarian traditionalists and all my clothes and bedlinens instead live in a huge gallery of ANTONIUS sliding basket racks in the closet. My writing and music-making workspace is a towering IVAR unit hacked into service as a standing desk with all sorts of enhancements and amendments, and my bed is a $59 IKEA double solid pine frame that I modified by cutting down the headboard to not overwhelm the radiator and windows there, adding two IKEA LANSA handles to keep the handcuffs from ruining the wood, and shored up to survive the giddy violence of a varying quantity of bears fucking to the cool sounds of Astrud Gilberto on the Grundig.

I brighten the room with zippy combinations of brightly colored linens and pillowcases, and it's a lovely refuge from this tacky, tacky world. If my home is a coffin, I return to it with the glee of a stylish vampire returning from another gory day of making a living, and it is a statement of uncollective perversity that reminds me of the real rewards of going one's own way.

IKEA is a toolbox, and a set of LEGO blocks of varying size, color, and quantity, but the catalogue is a wishbook, not the holy inerrant word of Ingvar Kamprad.
posted by sonascope at 4:48 AM on August 24, 2016 [77 favorites]

I've also seen apartment listings for cities like London which are ridiculous and are basically glorified shoeboxes. Those are tiny spaces, and I guess this is all part of a larger conversation about growing populations and where people are supposed to live.

Meanwhile, the lifestyle section of the Wall Street Journal talks up the new trend among the wealthy of buying entire apartment buildings in trendy inner-city areas and restoring them into the spacious one-family mansions they used to be.

Soaring inequality, and the inevitability of it, is part of the equation. The rich will get richer, there's nothing we can do about it because we don't want to make Atlas shrug and move to Dubai, depriving us of the shower of crumbs from his high table, so all of us little people will have to make do with less. But, hey, technology to the rescue! Replace your bookshelf with a Kindle, your record crates with Spotify and your home theatre with the Netflix app on your iPad. And soon they'll have clothes made of odour-absorbing nanomaterials, allowing us little people to reduce the amount of storage we reserve for multiple changes of clothes, and our living spaces to become yet more efficient. The future's bright.
posted by acb at 4:54 AM on August 24, 2016 [17 favorites]

growing populations and where people are supposed to live

... and is it really necessary they all live in the same place?

(... asks the guy who moved from a 100-acre farm to one of the world's more densely populated cities.)
posted by oheso at 4:55 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Okay but what the heck is with that chair mounted up on the wall near the ceiling, you guys? Why? WHY?

Heavy-handed irony.
posted by acb at 4:56 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Luxury. We had to live in a lake.
posted by Cookiebastard at 5:03 AM on August 24, 2016 [22 favorites]

I flipped through the catalog when it showed up in my mailbox last week, and to be completely honest I kind of loved it, and it may be part of why I started dreaming about small 1 bedroom houses again this weekend.

As a person who loves their solitude and is frequently put out by the long walk I have between my couch and my refrigerator, the small, efficient space design appeals to me. (What kind of weirdo eats at an actual table, anyway? Do you people not have televisions?) I would have loved that twin bed with the high walls as a kid, and I like the high walled sectional couch they're selling now. Seems like it would be pretty easy to drape a blanket over it and fort myself. Sure, I live alone, but with a fort I could also be living alone under a blanket.
posted by phunniemee at 5:03 AM on August 24, 2016 [19 favorites]

Okay but what the heck is with that chair mounted up on the wall near the ceiling, you guys? Why? WHY?

sometimes you need a chair for guests but it's in the way the rest of the time. We have two really nice chairs we've had to store at someone else's house for lack of room.
posted by jb at 5:07 AM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

Meanwhile, the lifestyle section of the Wall Street Journal talks up the new trend among the wealthy of buying entire apartment buildings in trendy inner-city areas and restoring them into the spacious one-family mansions they used to be.

That’s hardly a new trend, that's been going on in urban Victorian neighborhoods since the sixties and seventies. My neighborhood was all apartment buildings and boarding houses in the fifties but is mostly single family now.
posted by octothorpe at 5:07 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

American privilege vs European reality?
posted by blue_beetle at 5:09 AM on August 24, 2016 [11 favorites]

I'm looking forward to making one of those cute little apartments in one of our spare rooms. Just for the fun of it.
posted by jscalzi at 5:10 AM on August 24, 2016 [16 favorites]

Add me to the list of people who was put off by the dripping disdain of the people who are forced into "low"-rent situations, but want to make the best of it.

The implication that we chose this for ourselves is appalling.
posted by schmod at 5:10 AM on August 24, 2016 [35 favorites]

It's reassuring to know, though, that, in the midst of this turmoil and change, men will still be wearing baseball caps backward.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:11 AM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

Every single one of those apartments is larger than mine. I'd be delighted if I had the space for a couch. Or guests.
posted by pemberkins at 5:14 AM on August 24, 2016

Another Londoner here. Those Ikea flats look normal sized to me.
posted by toerinishuman at 5:15 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

... and is it really necessary they all live in the same place?

I actually really like living in a city in England that isn't London. I live in a nice flat that isn't an actual Harry Potter room under the stairs. I can still access good public transportation, art-y things like an opera house and a theatre, the dance classes I want, etc. It's not as glam as London but I just have absolutely no desire to live in London. As a social worker, there are plenty of job opportunities for me up here.

However, my partner is a sports journalist and his employer is pushing him more and more to move down to London despite the fact that he works from home. For people in industries like journalism, I can see how it is almost necessary to live where the jobs are, but I struggle to understand why all the jobs need to be in London in the first place.
posted by quadrant seasons at 5:16 AM on August 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

I'm looking forward to making one of those cute little apartments in one of our spare rooms. Just for the fun of it.

Like a dolls house, only life sized. And then you could make a dolls house sized version of it, like in Toys!
posted by glitter at 5:21 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

sometimes you need a chair for guests but it's in the way the rest of the time. We have two really nice chairs we've had to store at someone else's house for lack of room.

Huh. I was assuming the answer was something like "the art director thought the image looked a little too flat and wanted a little more 3D structure to give the space some depth. Plus, get sothme more furniture into the picture because it is a furniture catalog."

But the above is a rational reason a real human might do this... like ceiling mounted bike racks for garages. Except 1) folding chairs? This is why I have folding chairs. And 2) better not store too many extra chairs this way or you are quickly going to run out of places to put them where no one can bump their heads on them.

In the end, while, this somewhat reasonable explanation makes the image slightly less hilarious, I'm still thinking "the art director wanting some dimension" is more on point for this particular picture.
posted by OnceUponATime at 5:21 AM on August 24, 2016

My darling great aunt lived the last 30 years of her life in a smallish studio-with-kitchen, sleeping on a [very nice] daybed. It was a lovely place - a mid-century highrise with concierge service, in-building mini-grocery with deli, etc. (she bought in the property crash in 1980). But:

1. Not a micro apartment. None of these are micro-apartments, they're just small. We had a post here about micro apartments of 150ish square feet, or about two parking spaces-worth. Small? Hooray! 150 square feet? Sixties overpopulation dystopia, at least to me.

2. Economic polarization. When my great aunt died, one of the new rich bought her apartment so he could combine it with his other (large) apartment next door. I object strongly to the economic polarization of space.
posted by Frowner at 5:21 AM on August 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

I'd live on any of those places. The only thing I find a bit unreal in them is sunlight. With most 0-bedroom apartments I've seen here, you get a narrow balcony or a small window, not multiple top-to-bottom windows bathing the whole room in glorious sunlight.

we all have loads more "stuff" to stuff into them.
Do we? My nice stuff - a few books, dozens of music and sports magazines, around 140 vinyl records, 270 cds, 80 or so DVDs and a large videogame collection of over 600 videogames including a lot of mid 90s PC games with large boxes, could for the most part be digitised to a RAID as large as cooler, or on a cloud or distribution service (and a lot of willpower to part with stuff I've been colecting for 20 years or so). And for younger generations that don't see any value in physical media as they're mostly not growing with it, all they need is a cellphone with Spotify, a laptop with Steam and Netflix and a Kindle to get most of my shit covered. The rest is on a torrent somewhere.
posted by lmfsilva at 5:25 AM on August 24, 2016

American privilege vs European reality?
<jelly>Quite possibly, considering that the US apparently has the new catalog and I have to wait until Sept. 1st. </jelly>

I love Ikea. That said, I want to offer them my toddlers' services as furniture testers, because our sleeper sofa is being sorely tried by the eldest's emulation of Peppa Pig jumping in mud puddles. The bed ,however, seems to be fairing much better.
posted by romakimmy at 5:32 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

I live (with my family) in a ~3000 sq ft house in the midwest, because it makes sense in relation to where I am in my life. Those photos look perfectly fine, even appealing, to me, if I was at a different place in my life. I think the snark in the article is a bit over the top.
posted by jferg at 5:35 AM on August 24, 2016

Also, they don't know the difference between brick and cinder block.
posted by jferg at 5:36 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

And in regards to a smallish apartment, my apartment has two rooms and two roomlets jointly adding up to approximately five hundred square feet and change, but the third room encompasses approximately one hundred and ninety-six million square miles, so it's hard to feel cramped unless I forget that there's a door that leads into that space.
posted by sonascope at 5:42 AM on August 24, 2016 [14 favorites]

A lot of people like living in cities and are willing to put up with smaller living spaces for the sake of a night life, public transportation, a park system, and the occasional street festival? Companies locate in cities because people want to live there and it's easier to get good employees in thise locations?

(But some people would rather have more personal space at the expense of having to live in smaller, sleepier communities . That's not evil either.)
posted by OnceUponATime at 5:54 AM on August 24, 2016 [8 favorites]

idgi, aside from the "kitchen" which doesn't appear to have any kind of heating element to actually cook with (not even a microwave?), none of that looks terribly cramped to me?
posted by juv3nal at 5:54 AM on August 24, 2016

Every inch of floorspace not taken up by annoying things like tables or beds is floorspace I can dedicate to shelves for MORE BOOKS. There are only so many floating bookracks one can hang from the wall before the wall studs collapse.
posted by nicebookrack at 5:55 AM on August 24, 2016 [13 favorites]

Wouldn't it be a good thing if privileged people, who don't have to, chose to live in smaller spaces with fewer things? Isn't choosing to use less one of the things that lets humanity live longer?
posted by qbject at 5:55 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

Of the future? My apartment--where I've lived for 20+ years--is bigger than that, but not a whole lot. And I don't find this terrifying. I'm always ecstatic to see multi-use furniture designed to fit into tiny space X because I used to have to build things myself (outside, naturally) if I wanted something like that. Even now, in Boston, I look for new living room chairs, and most of the ones I find are the size of my entire living room. It is kind of Ikea to understand the realities of modern life.
posted by pangolin party at 5:56 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Dystopia is when white Americans have to live in the same conditions as the rest of the world.
posted by hydrophonic at 5:58 AM on August 24, 2016 [51 favorites]

Writer from the third largest country in the world decides not to understand that some places are smaller and/or denser than "the closest supermarket is a 20-minute drive away"

Whee

On the upside, we get to have a thread of people sharing how much they love IKEA (me too!) so at least some good came of it
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:00 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

What if there were some sort of hypothetical middle ground between the giant wasted spaces of McMansions and the claustrophobic micro-apartment / tiny house thing?
posted by entropicamericana at 6:03 AM on August 24, 2016 [9 favorites]

I love tiny apartments and I like these ideas, but what always bothers me about the IKEA catalogue is that they cheat with the height of the ceiling (or rather, they don't even have a ceiling). At least in my country (the Netherlands), the standard height of a newly built living space is 2.40m. There is no room for cute little mezzanines or sleeping on top of your closet or whatever. There is no room for hanging chairs off the wall; they'd be hanging in your face. Much of the roominess of these spaces comes from the excess height and light they have compared to the spaces normal people live in. Or is this different in other countries?
posted by Skyanth at 6:17 AM on August 24, 2016 [20 favorites]

They overstate their case, though the guy with no kitchen but plenty of "denim cubbies" was hilarious.

I loved the man-bun guy and his priorities.

Even now, in Boston, I look for new living room chairs, and most of the ones I find are the size of my entire living room. It is kind of Ikea to understand the realities of modern life.

My experience has been that for non-huge furniture, you basically have the choice of Ikea or high-end Scandanavian/modern furniture stores. The quality is probably better at the second, but the prices are mostly out of my reach, sadly, and with some care at Ikea the quality can be good.

Our current place is bigger than we need, probably 1100 square feet or so but not laid out super well. It could easily shrink by two or three hundred square feet without impacting anything, and with the right layout we could be completely happy in a much smaller place than that. This is what was available in the location we wanted and at the time we were moving; when the lease expires I will be tempted to look for a smaller place, though probably not micro-sized.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:19 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm just going to throw out this link to this article which discusses how the images in IKEA catalogs are created, and which was covered in this post previously.
posted by noneuclidean at 6:19 AM on August 24, 2016 [7 favorites]

So, my house is not a micro apartment, but it is about 900 square feet and old and built when rooms were small and the cabinets and closets tiny and it's hard for me to find new furniture that wasn't built to fill a McMansion or basic household goods that weren't packaged for people that have a garage-sized pantry. Someone upthread mentioned that we had more stuff to fill our apartments than they did in the 50s. That may be true, but the stuff itself is all bigger. The furniture, the appliances, the decor, the containers that household goods come in (buying in bulk only a fine idea if you have actually have a place to put it). I'm the granddaughter of an antique dealers and I can verify that basically everything used to be smaller--from teacups up. I sleep in an old double (full) bed, which is increasingly difficult to find sheets for. And trying to find a sofa that isn't some vast overstuffed, sectional behemoth (even at a place like IKEA) can be sort of a challenge.
posted by thivaia at 6:22 AM on August 24, 2016 [12 favorites]

As someone with a jittering horror of the way most people in my generation and older live their lives, I have to wonder if the maturing millennial generation is going to respond to having grown up in beige-infested homes cluttered with soulless crap existing solely for the purposes of meeting the standard of adulthood, in which their parents worked endless hours at jobs they hate to fill their lives with so much low-density pointlessness.

See, it all depends on how you grew up. I grew up in a small house - either upper-working or lower-middle depending on how you count it - with parents who loved books and music, so our house was full of bookcases of cheap paperbacks and we had a record player and tons of records. We had a tiny black and white TV for a long, long time, though. We had framed posters (Piranesi reproductions mainly, also a Brueghel the Elder that I know by heart from looking at all the peasants when I was little) and some really nice pottery thrown by a friend, and the little lacquer box my dad got my mom for Christmas one year, and my dad's mother's little Wedgewood collection (they were rural Indiana and houseproud)....The point is that your experience of stuff isn't necessarily just "beige box with random crap". Now I have my mother's parents' two special armchairs and my great-aunt's lamp and some of her paintings, a college friend's painting, some things from my great aunt's best friend's travels in Japan in the sixties...I love those things and they make me happy, and so do my books. They might be clutter to someone else who doesn't like stuff, but they are not to me.

Dystopia is when white Americans have to live in the same conditions as the rest of the world.

Could people think this one through? It's the same kind of thinking as when people are all like "Oh, fuck unions, those assholes get pensions,I don't get a pension in my shitty job so no one should get pensions, let's take them away!"

Somehow, as much as I recognize that there are different standards for personal space and space use around the world, I don't think that the Chinese family living in an illegal underground bunker/apartment-conversion, or the migrant Indian laborer living in a space barely large enough for a bed, or the the undocumented Eastern Europeans living ten to a room in some hideous tenement are all thinking "gee, I would never ever want my own apartment, or an apartment big enough for a bed and a table and maybe a bathtub, that's just bourgeois waste of space".

There's this whole modern line of argument (now I think at last slipping away) where we say that the problem is that when people in okay circumstances (able to afford a clean, modestly sized place to live, have healthcare, have transit, have retirement income support) lose those things, they complain. They're shitty people, because don't they understand that a decent life is impossible for most average people around the world?

This is really dangerous reasoning and people should truly, truly think twice before using it. The point is that everyone should have enough space for the needs of everyday life with enough over for, say, children to play or to have a craft table, everyone should have housing security, everyone should have income support. People who don't have them should be given them, and that is the single big human political struggle.
posted by Frowner at 6:22 AM on August 24, 2016 [68 favorites]

Well, they're not building any more land, and people aren't going to stop having kids, so the obvious solution is to find a portal to another dimension people can move to...like in Stranger Things, except ideally with fewer flesh-eating plant monster things.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:30 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Hmmm, I'm an old guy and I started out adulthood with a steamer trunk, a 10 speed (look it up kids), a sleeping bag and 2 posters (Ian Dury & Elvis Costello). I have moved through my adult life and have lived in plenty of apartments, mostly small. Now I'm in Denver, 1 block from City Park, I live in what would be considered a tiny 1 bedroom in the heart of the city. I love Ikea, I can find furniture that fits. Also I love mid century modern. What I love about this apartment is the high ceilings, it was built in the late 19th century. I can live without floor space if I have overhead space. I'm the guy with shelves that reach to the ceiling. I'm also 5'4", know what goes on the shelves I can't reach? The stuff I only occasionally need. Lightbulbs n stuff. I'm actually considering moving into one of the studio apartments in the building. What do I need with so much room?
posted by evilDoug at 6:33 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

The article and pics were quite confusing to me but the Wikipedia page describes microapartments as being 10 m²/107 sq feet or less, which is indeed small, and possibly close to illegal in some countries: in France, the minimum surface authorised is 9 m²/100 sq feet (since 2002) and newly built apartments must provide at least 14 m²/150 sq feet per person (since 1997) (there are also volume requirements).
posted by elgilito at 6:36 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ugh, the tone of that article left a bad taste in my mouth. Why so much disdain for the lived experiences of working class people who live in small spaces? Don't we deserve comfort, beauty and utility in living spaces, even if we rent instead of own them? Anyone who's ever lived small knows that furniture intended for "standard-sized" dwellings does not work well (or at all, sometimes) in small and oddly-shaped apartments. Ikea is one of the few companies that designs with us in mind, and I'm grateful for it.

Also, really appreciating the thoughtful comments from everyone, especially Frowner and sonascope. Y'all unpacked and articulated the subtextual issues surrounding this article in a masterful way. Helped get my brain going this morning even better than a cup of coffee!
posted by the thought-fox at 6:42 AM on August 24, 2016 [9 favorites]

1. Chairs-on-the-wall is an old Shaker thing and has always seemed really sensible to me. Our dining table has leaves that are put away most of the time when it's just the two of us at dinner; it would be nice to be able to put away the other chairs also.

2. God I want that kitchen. Our shitty particleboard cabinets are on their very last legs and starting to warp and fall off the wall and it is insane to me that we will probably have to replace them with more built-in cabinets at ruinous expense (which cabinets will then be replaced by the next owner at equally ruinous expense, because they have different taste in whatever). Why are kitchens not just made of furniture like the rest of the goddamn house? Why can't I buy some metro shelving with a slab of wood on top for a countertop and call it a day? Why can't the sink be part of some cart thing that can be unplugged and moved around like the stove and the refrigerator?
posted by enn at 6:43 AM on August 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

IKEA: the distopic micro-apartments of the impoverished are bigger and nicer than yours.
posted by blue_beetle at 6:45 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Well, they're not building any more land

I guess you're in the UK or Belgium or someplace like that. Over here in the US, there is empty land that stretches to every horizon in many places, so this statement is technically true while also meaningless.
posted by indubitable at 6:46 AM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

What if there were some sort of hypothetical middle ground between the giant wasted spaces of McMansions and the claustrophobic micro-apartment / tiny house thing?

Imagine that! I live in a 1600 square ft bungalow (includes basement space) which is sort of two households combined, my nuclear family of 4 + my mother-in-law who has her own kitchen downstairs although it's lacking a stove/oven, and a bathroom that is mostly hers. If I could add one walk-in closet to the house without sort of destroying rooms, I'd be in bliss.

Even so we have a rec room that holds the television but isn't all that commonly used as we're more prone to have iPads in the supposedly screen-free living room upstairs.

And...we love Ikea (carefully selected). We pretty much have furniture from each era of Ikea starting from the early 90s. We have discontinued red-brown Billy bookcases, two with glass doors, where our friends had a matching set and we agreed that as soon as someone caved to a one of the still-available colours the other friends would buy the old set...which we did.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:52 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

we will probably have to replace them with more built-in cabinets at ruinous expense

If you're going to have ruinous expense, can you do at least some furniture? My past place and my current house didn't/don't really have much by way of cabinets or counter space, so in my past place i just used this sixties wooden cabinet that had belonged to my great aunt, plus a rolling counter thing that had also belonged to my great aunt. In my current house with our ridiculous, tiny kitchen (no cabinets, deteriorated pantry, literally no counters) we have open shelves that we installed (away from the stove - they don't collect grease and they're just very ordinary heavy-duty bracketed shelves) and two pegboards, once for pots and pans and one for utensils (we got some perforated stainless steel canisters - at Ikea! - which we hang from the utensil one to hold our silverware).
posted by Frowner at 6:52 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

I love tiny apartments and I like these ideas, but what always bothers me about the IKEA catalogue is that they cheat with the height of the ceiling

My biggest problem with Ikea (apart from this one) is that they seem to miss the mark ever-so-slightly with their modular furniture options.

They've got a lot of really awesome closet-organization solutions that only work if your closets are a very particular size, or you're willing to put up with a certain amount of dead space.

Similarly, it wouldn't kill them to offer things like dressers in a few more sizes (at least for the popular models). I always get the impression that there are tons of missed opportunities for Ikea to put out more flexible/modular items. Those Kallax shelves are hugely popular because of their flexibility, and I don't get why Ikea doesn't apply that same design logic to their other product lines (or why even why they keep messing around with the sizes/configurations that the Kallax is available in).

---

That all being said, Ikea is a class act. They don't do everything perfectly, but their competitors don't even come close to achieving a comparable value proposition.

Yes, their staged apartments aren't incredibly realistic depictions of how people actually live, but it's a furniture store. They hit the mark a lot more closely than any other retailer that I've seen.
posted by schmod at 6:54 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Currently, Shepherd and I live in a funky 100+ year old house in a small Canadian city. It has three small bedrooms on the 2nd floor and the previous owners converted the attic into a loft bedroom. It's a nice space but there really entirely too much of it for two people and two cats and all their stuff. My husband likes having the room to spread out, I don't mind it either but I actively feel constantly guilty for having more space than we need. I suspect if we leave Kingston in a few years and relocate to a larger city, we might end up having to live in a smaller space. But I don't think I'd mind so much, especially if there are creative ways to utilize/maximize what space you do have. IKEA is really great for this; I wish there were less shitty snark involved. (Article, not posters.)
posted by Kitteh at 6:57 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Actually, what would be nice would be building more three-bedroom apartments - that's the thing you can't really get around here as far as I can tell. But if families are going to keep living in apartments, it's important to have more rooms for children. And before people point out that they shared a bedroom all their childhood, or that children in poor families have to sleep on the couch, etc, let's say that we're talking about the future we want to have, not just accepting that we should all live at baseline just-bearable.

And in re privacy: I would cite A Room of One's Own as well as Angela Carter's "The Box Does Furnish A Room". The one talks about the need for privacy if marginalized people (women, and rich white women, in the essay - but the principle holds) are going to do sustained creative work and the other talks about the desire for privacy among working class people in cramped lodgings*. I would also point out that privacy is important for young people - a door you can close, space to read what you like, space where you can change clothes or look at your body without being shamed or at risk, etc. And while a bedroom of one's own doesn't guarantee those things, it's a first step to providing them.

Three bedroom apartments allow for parents and bedrooms for (at least) two children. And three bedroom apartments are super-golden-rainbow-unicorn apartments.

It's not so much the size of the rooms as the privacy. I live in a crumbling, cheap, huge Victorian. It's too big, even when we have three housemates and one longish term guest. But the bedrooms aren't too big - we all have our own and that makes the house work. (The kitchen is still weirdly tiny, though.)

*Carter argues that the TV provides privacy (this is the eighties) because it provides a logic of "don't bother her, her show is on". When people's personal favorite shows are on, it's almost - almost - like they can be by themselves, despite the crowding around them. But the point is that just because people live in a cramped space without privacy, that does not mean that they don't want privacy.
posted by Frowner at 7:07 AM on August 24, 2016 [13 favorites]

The article and pics were quite confusing to me but the Wikipedia page describes microapartments as being 10 m²/107 sq feet or less, which is indeed small, and possibly close to illegal in some countries: in France, the minimum surface authorised is 9 m²/100 sq feet (since 2002) and newly built apartments must provide at least 14 m²/150 sq feet per person (since 1997) (there are also volume requirements).

This seems to be the size of the model apartments that IKEA builds in their stores to show off a coordinated look.
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:07 AM on August 24, 2016

I loathe Ikea with a burning passion (hint: many of their furniture might be great, but avoid even attempting to buy a dresser from them, much less expect it to survive normal usage or a move), but many of these apartments seemed fine--and certainly less dank and gloomy than where most millennials are living!

The only thing I objected to was, in the kitchen setup, how temporary everything looked. Like, I resented that on one hand they're trying to be all, "microapartments is the new trend!" on the one hand while also trying to be "that of course isn't how you REALLy want to live" on the other. Embrace it or not, but don't try to make it seem so transitional. I had the idea that aspirational housing always has to get bigger instead of just nicer.

That said, I did crack up at, if your little ingrate kids wanted privacy so bad, one of them should have absorbed the other in the fucking womb.
posted by TwoStride at 7:08 AM on August 24, 2016

Similarly, it wouldn't kill them to offer things like dressers in a few more sizes (at least for the popular models). I always get the impression that there are tons of missed opportunities for Ikea to put out more flexible/modular items. Those Kallax shelves are hugely popular because of their flexibility, and I don't get why Ikea doesn't apply that same design logic to their other product lines (or why even why they keep messing around with the sizes/configurations that the Kallax is available in).

Kallax, successor to Expedit, a beloved shelving system. Both seem to be perfectly sized for milk crates.
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:09 AM on August 24, 2016

Actually, what would be nice would be building more three-bedroom apartments - that's the thing you can't really get around here as far as I can tell. But if families are going to keep living in apartments, it's important to have more rooms for children.

I think that the developers' assumption is that cities are for young people who will move out to the 'burbs when they have kids and not move back until they're empty nesters.
posted by octothorpe at 7:14 AM on August 24, 2016

All of these are nicer than any of the three places I lived in New York. And than many of the apartments I lived in in Texas. If I were single and empty nesting, I would like them just fine, as apartments. Unless I had obnoxious neighbors and thin walls or something.
posted by emjaybee at 7:21 AM on August 24, 2016

That all being said, Ikea is a class act. They don't do everything perfectly, but their competitors don't even come close to achieving a comparable value proposition.

Their competitors may not be registered as non-profit charities, and may pay taxes. IKEA is a very modern outfit in these areas.
posted by Coda Tronca at 7:23 AM on August 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

winterhill, I've also thought about canal boats. I really like the idea of living on water, seeing new places and yet still having my little bits of stuff that I do still want. Downside for me, I hate seafood, or freshwater fish for that matter.
posted by evilDoug at 7:31 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

avoid even attempting to buy a dresser from them, much less expect it to survive normal usage or a move

We bought Hemnes dressers for our kids, who are now teenagers, years and years ago and they have both survived really, really well (the kids AND the dressers). The Boy is not known for treating furniture well, and his dresser looks nearly new.

We also bought Hemnes nighstands at the same time to use as end tables in the family room, where they get even more use than the dressers, and they look fantastic.
posted by cooker girl at 7:34 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Or if you happen to have a larger apartment, you can make it look like a McMansion apartment by filling it with tiny apartment IKEA furniture.

For years I've always scoured the children's section of IKEA for small pieces of furniture that fit just right where none of the big people furniture they sell will. Sounds like they just got hip to the same idea.

My electrician once noticed I had a big IKEA bookshelf in the dining room and asked me if I'd put it together myself. Yes... isn't that what you're supposed to do? He explained that he made quite a bit of cash on the side putting IKEA furniture together for his customers. Apparently it's the habit for people to buy furniture, and then leave it piled up in boxes waiting for the electrician, plumber, etc. to show up, and then they get asked if they have time to put some furniture together.
posted by lagomorphius at 7:37 AM on August 24, 2016 [7 favorites]

We have an expedit shelf that we bought about 6 moves ago, have taken apart and reassembled over and over. The thing is sturdy, the only issue we have is some scuffs on the shelving.

I don't get the hate on the quality.
posted by Ferreous at 7:40 AM on August 24, 2016 [5 favorites]

That all being said, Ikea is a class act. They don't do everything perfectly, but their competitors don't even come close to achieving a comparable value proposition.

The thing I always start off with when I'm talking about how much I love Ikea is RUGS. Have you ever tried to buy a cheap rug? When I was getting ready to start college, I remember going around to store after store after store with my mom trying to find a colorful, inexpensive area rug. They do not make them. Cheap rugs come in shades of brown and taupe and beige with brown accents. It's like you're being punished for being poor. You're starting to see more options these days, but believe me when I tell you that 10-15 years ago there were zero non-poo color area rug options in the sub-$30 range.

Imagine my elation a few years ago when I walked into Ikea for the first time and saw this living room-appropriate-size rug for $14.99. FIFTEEN DOLLARS for a cute, bright red rug! Ikea has charming, colorful rugs at a price where I can re-do my living room color scheme for the cost of brown bagging my lunch for two days.
posted by phunniemee at 7:51 AM on August 24, 2016 [15 favorites]

The shelves and tables and sofas have been fine. I have probably a dozen Billy bookcases scattered around. I've had disastrous times with their dressers, is all.
posted by TwoStride at 7:52 AM on August 24, 2016

People are bad with their tools, they're sloppy, or they make changes without understanding the implications.

Screw things in a little looser than optimal, and it'll still look great on day one, but it'll get wobbly in like a year.

Decide you want to go without the back panel of the Billy? It'll hold for a while, but that thing's structural! Nailed in properly, it keeps the thing from going all parallelogram on you!

A lot of people just don't really understand leverage or torque; a nice, tight, properly assembled joint will have the strength to last forever, even a little play will lead to things working themselves apart pretty quickly.

For the record, our Malm bed has survived 3 moves (disassembled each time!), and the matching Malm dressers have survived 2 moves. Ikea is great. I wish there was one closer than 45 minutes away from me.
posted by explosion at 7:53 AM on August 24, 2016 [8 favorites]

Oh man, all the rugs in my house are IKEA rugs. Durable, colourful, and cheap. Their bed linens are pretty good too.
posted by Kitteh at 7:54 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

We're how many comments in and nobody's posted Jonathan Coulton's Ikea song?
posted by SansPoint at 7:54 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

Apparently it's the habit for people to buy furniture, and then leave it piled up in boxes waiting for the electrician, plumber, etc. to show up, and then they get asked if they have time to put some furniture together.

I am in no way a high-scorer on those 3-D, manipulate-this-image-in-space tests, but I rather enjoy putting together IKEA furniture (or other flat pack furniture, but most of it is not as well-made as theirs).

The hard part is usually finding the space on the floor to assemble it (and having a floor that's decently level). But otherwise, it's not that hard.

I admit to not having tried any really complicated furniture with lots of sliding bits or glass or what have you. But we've had two beds, many bookcases, a dresser and some lamps and managed fine.
posted by emjaybee at 7:56 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Imagine my elation a few years ago when I walked into Ikea for the first time and saw this living room-appropriate-size rug for $14.99. FIFTEEN DOLLARS for a cute, bright red rug! Ikea has charming, colorful rugs at a price where I can re-do my living room color scheme for the cost of brown bagging my lunch for two days.

Yes, absolutely, so much this! Several years ago I found this large area rug that was such a perfect fit for the color scheme and style of my bedroom. I still have it, two apartments later, and I still love it. I don't remember how much I paid, but I know it was pretty cheap because I was even more broke back then. And just as importantly, it looks so nice! It's really hard to find a decent cheap rug, especially a large area rug.
posted by litera scripta manet at 7:58 AM on August 24, 2016

Oh, and I think the portable kitchen thing is a concept borrowed from the European market, where "BYO Kitchen" is a thing in some countries. I don't think there are many places in the US that allow rental units to lack a functioning kitchen.

I think the idea is that most of these small places, being converted from offices downtown, people would eat out and wouldn't cook that often, but still need someplace to clean dishes and cutlery from takeout or from preparing simple meals on something like a multicooker.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:59 AM on August 24, 2016

A casualty of this is not being to curate your space, filling it with artefacts of your personality and outlook; books, records, souvenirs from travels, and such.

ctrl-F "dorm" no results

College students have no trouble displaying their personalities and outlooks in tiny, cramped spaces. I think the rest of humanity may also manage.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:00 AM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

As I perched glamorously on my EKENÄSET...

Having lived and worked in Ekenäs (Finland, Tammisaari in Finnish), I always do a double take. Plus I love that chair. (The classic one with wood framing. Not the all-cushiony one.)

As for the FPP. I'm finding the article a bit blinkered to say the least. They are aware that quite a few places that consider themselves civilized sit and eat on floors, right.

On the other hand, yeah, I know people in San Francisco who are sleeping their family of four in a single bedroom in a tiny two-bedroom house just so they can afford the rent with a roommate in the second bedroom. They're like, "we have a house in San Francisco!" and we're like, okay.
posted by fraula at 8:01 AM on August 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

Cooking for oneself in one's own home seems to be one of those phenomena in transition from being an unquestioned assumption of civilised life to being an anachronistic artefact; sort of like having a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on one's living-room bookshelves.
posted by acb at 8:02 AM on August 24, 2016 [5 favorites]

College students have no trouble displaying their personalities and outlooks in tiny, cramped spaces.

Constraining one's space-decoration to taped-up photos and LEGO/vinyl figurines is a pretty bleak outlook. Those suffice for a transitional situation, like a college dorm (which is not, as I understand it, the inhabitant's actual home; either they still have a room at their parents' place, or they have boxes of stuff in storage waiting for a real home). They also suffice for the top of one's computer monitor at work, or the inside of a locker. They do not suffice for the only home of an adult with decades of life.

Of course, one could adapt to such lowered horizons; humans are nothing if not adaptable. But let's not pretend that it would not be a pretty bleak change for the human condition.
posted by acb at 8:08 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

If HGTV is anything to go by, the craze for tiny houses isn't going anywhere soon, either.

I have an IKEA two-seater dining room set (table, two chairs, two end tables, and sideboard with drawers) that my sister and I pulled out of the dumpster the week the college students moved out of town. Sturdy as heck; it's lasted me for decades. It's just the right size for a small apartment, but somehow it doesn't look modular or squeezed in.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:10 AM on August 24, 2016

(Also I chuckle because my tiny studio apartment continually got compliments from visitors on its cohesive design and mostly original framed art. Meanwhile, my cousin's 4 bedroom suburban home is decorated with...taped up photos and LEGO. Space isn't necessarily the issue.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:18 AM on August 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

I think that temperament is an unaddressed piece of these conversations. Some people really....don't care about their physical environment as long as it's not physically uncomfortable. Other people really enjoy being surrounded by varieties of texture and color. Still other people care about their environment in a "I really want it to be simple and bare because that is soothing" way.

One of my housemates lives in a room that is basically boxes of stuff, a TV and a bed and he is perfectly happy. I actively enjoy looking at the play of color and shape that my furniture and objects give to my room and I enjoy handling/using those things. (Meaning, up to a point I don't mind dusting.)

We live together in a crumbling house on a working class street - same house, similar income, very different preferences about physical environment.

It's not a moral difference - it's a difference of temperament. If we were broker, I would still have colorful miscellany in my room (as I know from past experience); if we were richer, he'd still live in a room full of plastic storage.
posted by Frowner at 8:33 AM on August 24, 2016 [16 favorites]

Yes, these aren't micro-apartments, they're just small.

The thing about micro-apartments in big cities is that so far they have not turned out to be particularly affordable, e.g., $2650/mo. for 250 sq ft. (making the various tradeoffs, $2650/mo. will get you a decent human-sized studio or a downmarket one-bed, even in Manhattan.) So the movement seems to be primarily about making excuses to lower the already low floor on what constitutes, say, an NYC apartment. That's what bothers me most. Like, not all space is merely indulgence. My current apartment is quite small, and I'm mostly resigned to it, but the tiny, tiny kitchen? That makes it a lot more inconvenient to cook for myself, and that's not only a quality-of-life concern, it's a budget concern.

(There may, however, be some use for such tiny apartments in, say, supportive housing, where people are living in a somewhat more community-oriented fashion anyway and frankly may not be up to cooking for themselves.)
posted by praemunire at 8:45 AM on August 24, 2016 [9 favorites]

Cooking for oneself in one's own home seems to be one of those phenomena in transition from being an unquestioned assumption of civilised life to being an anachronistic artefact

If by "civilised" you mean "middle and upper class in the 19th and 20th centuries" then yes. Poor folks have always made do with inadequate kitchens, hot plates, automats, takeout joints...I'm talkin' way back to Pompeii, dude.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:46 AM on August 24, 2016 [8 favorites]

Constraining one's space-decoration to taped-up photos and LEGO/vinyl figurines is a pretty bleak outlook. Those suffice for a transitional situation, like a college dorm (which is not, as I understand it, the inhabitant's actual home; either they still have a room at their parents' place, or they have boxes of stuff in storage waiting for a real home). They also suffice for the top of one's computer monitor at work, or the inside of a locker. They do not suffice for the only home of an adult with decades of life.

Of course, one could adapt to such lowered horizons; humans are nothing if not adaptable. But let's not pretend that it would not be a pretty bleak change for the human condition.

Yeah ok, the human condition is wildly variable, and I'd guess that the majority of the world would not look at a living space like this and be all oh how bleak.

There was a really cool photo series several years ago called 100x100 where this guy went through a public housing block of micro apartments in HK taking photos. You can look at it here. Yes, this is an incredibly small amount of space for people, especially several people in some cases, to be living in, but it also gives a really great look at how people can make a small space their own. Some of them are packed to the gills. Some of them are sparse and, yes, bleak. But a lot of them manage to still make their space look homey and very much their own without (gasp!!) using any legos whatsoever.

yeah that's right, folks. I pluralized legos. your bitter tears sustain me.
posted by phunniemee at 8:49 AM on August 24, 2016 [5 favorites]

Small apartments with cheap public transport and mixed-use space are awesome. Without that, you're stuck inside your four-walls and there's nothing outside. With cheap transport and a vibrant neighbourhood, you can walk outside and do a lot of the things that you might need a house for. Instead of having a big dining room, have your friends meet you at the big coffeeshop downstairs for dinner and go upstairs for drinks (or to the nearby bar). Instead of a backyard, go to the neighbourhood playground and park. Instead of a pantry and big fridge, have a supermarket and farmer's market nearby and pick up groceries a few times a week on your way home because they're frequently open and easy.

I remember as a kid seeing one of those Usbourne science illustrations about urban planning or space exploration and it had this brilliant image of a glass mega-pyramid city with a cutaway showing all these people living inside a giant skyscraper with a huge garden-atrium inside it so everyone had light and there were high-speed elevators and waterfalls and all that.

What struck me most wasn't the idea of living in a giant pyramid - that seems fine because I'm already living in a giant tower and a pyramid would be awesome too - but that he caption talked about space usage, how people would live in these huge mega-cities to free up enormous tracts of land for robo-farming and (off-handedly) wilderness parks for everyone to enjoy... and that's what's stuck in my head.

Imagine a world of giant bustling mega-cities designed for humans and enormous national parks inbetween, instead of endless suburbs. So much more fun. And probably way more enrivonmentally efficient.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:58 AM on August 24, 2016 [10 favorites]

If people can drive Fords and Toyotas, and vacuum with Hoovers and Bissells, they can play with Legos. That's how English works, and the Lego company/community needs to accept that.

/derail
posted by explosion at 8:58 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Woah, there is so much should/is and choose/necessity conflation going on here; interesting to see people so defensive about smaller spaces. But focusing on either a) people live in smaller spaces so this article is privileged crap or b) stuff is ephemeral and it's morally superior to have less of it, kinda misses the point, doesn't it? This seems to be the issue, for me:

Could people think this one through? It's the same kind of thinking as when people are all like "Oh, fuck unions, those assholes get pensions,I don't get a pension in my shitty job so no one should get pensions, let's take them away!"

Somehow, as much as I recognize that there are different standards for personal space and space use around the world, I don't think that the Chinese family living in an illegal underground bunker/apartment-conversion, or the migrant Indian laborer living in a space barely large enough for a bed, or the the undocumented Eastern Europeans living ten to a room in some hideous tenement are all thinking "gee, I would never ever want my own apartment, or an apartment big enough for a bed and a table and maybe a bathtub, that's just bourgeois waste of space.
There's this whole modern line of argument (now I think at last slipping away) where we say that the problem is that when people in okay circumstances (able to afford a clean, modestly sized place to live, have healthcare, have transit, have retirement income support) lose those things, they complain. They're shitty people, because don't they understand that a decent life is impossible for most average people around the world?

This is really dangerous reasoning and people should truly, truly think twice before using it. The point is that everyone should have enough space for the needs of everyday life with enough over for, say, children to play or to have a craft table, everyone should have housing security, everyone should have income support. People who don't have them should be given them, and that is the single big human political struggle.".
posted by AFII at 8:59 AM on August 24, 2016

We (family of 3) just moved from an 800 sq ft house to a 1200 sq ft one and OMG SO MUCH SPACE WHAT DO I DO WITH IT ALL??? We have a whole spare room!

I'm getting all the new furniture I need at Ikea because it's still one of the only places to get normal-sized furniture that isn't bespoke handmade $$$$$$. Furniture that isn't built for McMansions is often a luxury in the US. It's weird.

(Also, I am on Team Arcology, for the record. Let's all live in giant pyramids!)
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:59 AM on August 24, 2016

Funny you mention dorms, because recently there have been a spate of articles criticizing the young (mostly) women who partake in the tradition of elaborate coordinated dorm room decor at Ole Miss. There's been a backlash to that criticism, too. The funny thing is, I don't think people would look twice at that level of decor if it were in a larger apartment or house. It kind of feels like decoration and customization are only "allowed" if you first achieve the requisite square feet (because that's what we all want, right?).
posted by R a c h e l at 8:59 AM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

Lots of dorms have been admiringly featured on Apartment Therapy, though. I'm guessing the Ole Miss backlash is more about the pressure to match and spend $$$. I mean, even (yikes!) 20 years ago when I was starting college, my new roommate snail-mailed (!) me to inform me what colors her bedding was going to be, and suggested that I try to match. I wrote back that there was no way in hell I would do that, which she accepted, and thus set the tone for a cordial if chilly first rooming year!
posted by TwoStride at 9:08 AM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

It's all just stuff.

Absolutely. The list of things that I'd really miss if they were gone is, if I'm honest with myself, pretty small. Sure, there are a few things with sentimental value, but not many.

And as others have remarked, with the Internet, cloud storage and the like, there's a lot of physical stuff I don't need any more. A *lot* of CDs and books have gone.

This year Mrs.43rd and I are doing two things. The first is getting rid of one thing every day. This is often looking at things when I go into the attic or understairs cupboard and realizing they haven't been used (or even looked at) for years, but also applies to unworn clothes and things like that.

The second thing is not buying any new 'stuff' this year. Consumables are fine, as is replacing things that break or wear out, but nothing new. It has been rather liberating, and certainly makes more time at weekends when you're not out shopping.

And as for these apartments, nope, they aren't that small. Try living on a small(ish) narrowboat for a while - that *is* small.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 9:11 AM on August 24, 2016

Add me to the list of those who don't understand the manufactured snark in TFA.

Whatever IKEA's faults - I don't live close enough to one to be a customer - they have nothing to do with the implied apartment sizes in these promotional photos, which honestly don't look all that small to me. But I have never lived in a McMansion - we (middle-aged couple) have a modest 60s era house in the suburbs of a small city with 1500 sqft we mostly don't know what to do with and which is tiresome to keep clean week after week - so maybe younger folks who grew up in much bigger houses with maid service or a clean-freak parent on speed have higher standards for interior spaciousness? Or most likely the author was over-reaching for the web snark, IKEA hate/love's a great topic to get clickthroughs, right?
posted by aught at 9:16 AM on August 24, 2016

I really don't like the tone of this article. Feel free to hate on Ikea, that's a matter of preference, but shitting on small living spaces is bullshit. The author lives down the road from me in Somerville and its not like there's a lot of big, affordable apartments there. Maybe he's experiencing anxiety about getting priced out and having to make due with less? I was priced out of The Ville last year and had to move further out to find enough space for my growing family. I was pretty pissed, but with some serious searching I landed in a better spot. Regardless, it's not like folks around here can afford the ever more expensive single family homes on our stagnant wages. Being a dick to all of us who can't afford a big place is pretty low class.

I've been an apartment dweller since I was first able to escape suburbia and nearly all of it in Boston. I've lived across the city from student ghetto to near-suburbia and I've never had a place that wasn't full to bursting with roommates. Ikea furniture fits apartments, it's portable for the inevitable move (and narrow/flat packable to get up those twisty stairs), and it's modular enough to look good with lots of other stuff. In 10 years my wife and I went from a postage stamp 1 bed to a cramped 2 bed (+child) to a slightly less cramped 2 bed (+ another child) and our Ikea stuff fit each space beautifully. It's unlikely I'll ever own a home, but I like to live well in the small spaces I can afford.
posted by Lighthammer at 9:16 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

I would gladly live in a smaller space but here in NYC they're trendy and cost as much as a full-size market rate 1BR.

And maybe I'm just getting oversensitive as I age but it always strikes me as classist when people look down their noses at IKEA stuff.
posted by Gev at 9:19 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

trying to find a sofa that isn't some vast overstuffed, sectional behemoth (even at a place like IKEA) can be sort of a challenge.

A friend of mine ran into this problem when he bought a sofa--not an ostentatiously huge, overstuffed number by any means--and couldn't get it into his house, conversely not one of these absurdly tiny microhouses that you see in books and websites. He literally could not get it in the front or rear doors by any method.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:22 AM on August 24, 2016

I'm wondering if cooking at home is transitioning as a marker of wealth and status. Changing from a connotation of "I can't afford to eat out every night" to "I can afford a home with a fully equipped kitchen" (with a side-order of enough free time to cook as a leisure activity). A bit like how being tan transitioned from "I work outside all day" to "I can afford to take a holiday in the sun" in European cultures a couple centuries ago.
posted by penguinicity at 9:24 AM on August 24, 2016 [8 favorites]

The last time I did a lot of shopping at Ikea, one of the things I most appreciated is that the store carried a good selection of affordable house plants.

No matter how small the space or how poor the lighting, there are hardy plants that will survive and thrive there.

In addition to improving air quality, they're quite cheerful and soothing, and it's so interesting to watch them grow and change. One of my begonias is very happy right now, and it's producing a cluster of new shoots that look like little arms reaching up, new leaves ruffled and deep maroon and unfolding like a closed fist opening. It's kind of like having a tank full of slow-motion tropical fish, but with less work involved. And of course the play of color, shape and texture is very pleasing and offers another way to design and personalize your small space.

In fact, one of my small daily pleasures is sitting on my comfy couch (bought after much agonizing and searching from Crate and Barrel because it had the right dimensions to fit my small living room), draped with soft, colorful blankets and pillows, warming my hands on a mug of coffee while I watch the bright morning sunlight pour through the window and light up my the leaves of my plants like nature's own tiny stained glass windows.

I guess what I'm saying is, when it comes to making your small living space comfortable and pleasing, you do you. And also, you do plants. *grin*

And also also, I think the huge glass mega-pyramid sounds grand. Sign me up!
posted by the thought-fox at 9:30 AM on August 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

When I moved into my small and weirdly laid out house 11 years ago, much of the furniture that came with me was Ikea stuff, often the ugliest Ikea stuff. I had a Scarlett O'Hara moment after moving in when I swore that NO MORE MATCHY-MATCHY IKEA would ever enter this house.

But I had a budget. So I furnished my house with some faux-Mission open-sided solid wood bookcases from Staples (replacing some beech-and-grey open shelving from Ikea), a dark brown rubberwood table from Leon's (replacing a beech table from Ikea), and a truly awkward and ugly chandelier from Home Depot that was just put out of its misery this weekend after 3 of its 6 sockets died.

Yet Ikea was still a presence in my house along with the cherished family hand-me-downs. My second floor office is almost pure Ikea: a Jerker desk with extra shelves inherited from my ex-; that beech dining table, which holds the box fan that has made this summer bearable; and a tall metal shelving unit holding paper, boxes and books in an awkward corner. It just all WORKS.

And bit by bit, new Ikea product has insinuated itself in my home once again. First was the low TV/stereo unit with casters that I got from Craigslist a few years ago. It cost $30 instead of $90, and needed just a little refinishing. Then I bought a bunch of the last stock of Expedit 2 x 2 units (not the aesthetically inferior Kallax) which anytimerealsoonnow will be installed in my living room. A couple of low black Mulig shelving units have made their way all over the house this past year, holding wet boots and shoes, sprouting tomato plants, and the box fan that has made my bedroom bearable. And that horrific dining room chandelier was replaced with a large and elegant Calypso ceiling light, which brings me joy every time I flip it on (and flip the bird at people who insist that you need a hanging light over the dining room table. No, you do NOT.)

Ikea has some good stuff. Yes, I still scour sidewalks and Craigslist, because I have no intention of living in the Etobicoke showroom. But a little Ikea can make a nicer home without breaking the bank.
posted by maudlin at 9:33 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Frowner, I'm curious to know if 'a bedroom for every person' would allow for a walkable-scale community/city/etc. (without doing skyscrapers). Does anyone know anything about that, one way or the other? I know that the US ideal of tons of living space seems to go hand in hand with car-centric sprawl....

Well, I live in Minneapolis and there are many neighborhoods where "a bedroom for every person" (assuming that, actually, many couples share a room) is pretty doable. The ones where it's not doable tend to be poor neighborhoods that are really overcrowded.

This is a street view of a place a couple of miles from where I live that is somewhat cleaner than my street but not dissimilar. I think that people assume that "three bedrooms in a three-person household" means three large bedrooms, three ensuite bathrooms, three walk-in closets, etc, when around here it means "three bedrooms that range from about 8 x 10 to 15 x 12", with shared bathroom and closet integrated into the space.

In Chicago, which is much denser, there's whole blocks of three-flats that tend to have, IME, two or more bedrooms. When I had to drive around Chicago a bit years ago, I saw lots of nice working class streets of three flats with trees and on-street parking.

Also, one thing that people forget about medium-heavy density (not super-density like New York or the core of Chicago) is that it tends to be not dense enough that everyone uses public transit for everything but dense enough that parking is a hideous nightmare. I live on a street where there aren't bedrooms for all due to income/unscrupulous landlord issues and parking would be really hard if I had a car. A couple of streets away, where it's all houses and three-flats but less dense, parking is much easier.

Honestly, I don't think that bedrooms for all really make too much difference, and the difference they make is the kind of difference you want to make.
posted by Frowner at 9:35 AM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

recently there have been a spate of articles criticizing the young (mostly) women who partake in the tradition of elaborate coordinated dorm room decor at Ole Miss. There's been a backlash to that criticism, too.

Oh, thank you for mentioning this--I'd missed hearing about it. I have fond memories of my freshman dorm room at Ole Miss, with my roommate's taste and mine sharply delineated by an imaginary line down the middle of the room. My side included extra storage provided by paperboard boxes duct-taped to the walls. Hers was a lot better looking, with no soldering irons or X-Men action figures, and fabric colors chosen for something other than stain-camouflage and launderability.

The roommates who'd managed to agree on decor and had lofted their beds to provide extra seating were much more appealing to guests, so we didn't have many visitors spending time in our room. I regret that my roommate didn't get that experience until later. Oh, memories.
posted by asperity at 9:36 AM on August 24, 2016

Those apartments look bigger than almost anywhere I've lived since childhood. I hate not having space. I live in a small Midlands town and nobody I know can really afford decent space. It puts serious limitations on what you can do, especially if you're poor. Sure, if I had money, I could just go out for dinner with my friends instead of cooking in a postage stamp kitchenette and crowding us all onto the tiny patch of floor space (except the two who get the sofa). Well, obviously my friends would need to have money for themselves too, or we're talking a lot more money. I could no doubt rent space somewhere in a workshop or industrial unit to do a lot of the projects I'd like to, but that's a lot more expensive than getting old tools from charity shops, if only I had somewhere to put them. Or to put a bench. I could totally have a full backline on hand to bring to gigs I play if I had space to store it. Instead, every time a lovely amp or PA or drum kit gets offered to me for cheap or free, I have to turn it down. Consequently, I end up paying for bands to transport things for gigs I run, and having to borrow or rent when playing elsewhere. I have a bunch of old computers sitting in a pile behind the TV because there's nowhere to set them up. I could go on, but the picture should be clear.
posted by Dysk at 9:40 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

I don't mind modest-sized one-bedroom apartments; what I do mind is the downward pressure on sizes, caused largely by greedy developers subdividing buildings into ever-smaller apartments.

I live in a one-bedroom flat at the moment; it's considerably smaller than the one I lived in some 8 years earlier a bit up the road. I miss having a bedroom where there's space for anything more than a double bed, two wardrobes (one of whose doors almost open before hitting the bed) and some storage units for clothing. I miss having a bedside table, rather than just the windowsill to put my phone on. I miss having enough space for shelves for books and records. (My living room is partitioned in half by an IKEA BILLY bookcase, each of whose shelves is double-layered with books; most of my CDs have been in storage boxes in a crawlspace since I moved in) I miss having the space for a desk with enough space behind it to not have to climb into my chair like a pilot climbing into a cockpit. I miss not stepping over things to get between parts of my flat, or playing Towers Of Hanoi when I wish to get at some particular item.

Occasionally I look at other flats in the area, to see whether the grass is greener on the other side; it isn't, in any price range within reach. The last one I saw was £200/month more than mine and much smaller; the living room was a glorified corridor with a bulge for an easy chair and TV, and the “kitchen” was a bar one could butter a slice of bread on. There was next to no storage space. (Perhaps the intended tenants still had all their stuff at their parents' home somewhere in Hampshire or Kent or somewhere?)

Just having stuff (not collections of vintage cars or anything, just nontrivial amounts of books or records or tchotkes or whatever) seems to be becoming a status symbol, a marker of being Successful and Affluent.
posted by acb at 9:41 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

I absolutely love those decorated Ole Miss dorm rooms. If you have the money and the energy to pull it off, more power to you. I can absolutely see how having a comfortable , pleasant oasis could really help with the stress of undergraduate life.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:45 AM on August 24, 2016

I like Ikea, except for the fact as a single lady I fear going there alone. I am convinced that lost wandering couples prey on the single gazelle.

And this really seems like a weird reaction to the realities of modern life - "but what about the good china?" . Life has gotten more casual and much faster. Good china seems to be a thing for later in life- or not at all.

I do take umbrage at man-bun-boy - no institution should validate that hairdo.
posted by LuckyMonkey21 at 9:46 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Terrifying? My wife and I tend to stay at AirBnB aprtments that are very small but that are very well laid out and of course they tend to use IKEA furnishings. If you are bedridden, sure, you would feel cramped but for people that live most of their lives outside of their apartment, why have something more spacious than you need?
posted by JJ86 at 9:53 AM on August 24, 2016

The average UK house is getting smaller- with less and smaller rooms. UK new builds are the smallest in Western Europe,probably because there are no minimum standards.

It probably doesn't help that the state broadcaster ran shows telling people to split already small flats into two flats and then flip them for instant profits.
posted by srboisvert at 10:04 AM on August 24, 2016

As a follow-on to the "does bedrooms for all mean sprawl" issue - Minneapolis is super, super bike-able and was ranked by Forbes as the most bike-friendly city in the US in 2015. In 2014, Bicycling magazine ranked us 3rd in the US, behind Chicago and New York but ahead of Portland, San Fran, etc. (And having biked in Chicago, look, I still think that's equivocal - there's magnificent, world-beating things like biking from the north end of the city to the south end along the lakefront, but you still take your life in your hands biking on the street in many neighborhoods, whereas almost all streets here are far safer than any Chicago street.)

So really, we can't be all that horrible, sprawl-wise. I have lived without a car for almost my entire 19 years here, bike commute year round, etc.
posted by Frowner at 10:05 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

I know a landlord renting out studio flats who likes to convert them so the main room is laid out exactly like a large family kitchen, with cabinets down two sides like you might find in a 5-bedroom house, full-size fridge and washing machine etc. Then he sticks a double bed in the middle. Tenants can extend an arm from the bed to the toaster. Apparently the crazy youngsters love it and the first viewer usually snaps it up.
posted by Coda Tronca at 10:19 AM on August 24, 2016

I have plenty of room but have put off other methods of buying a cheap sofa* for my den to wait for the new IKEA to open up near us next year. Gonna get me a nice futon and a fold-up privacy screen of some kind and I'm set for both regular seating/reading nook and guest accommodations.

I'd just order online but shipping is crazy expensive. Cheaper to borrow my father-in-law's truck and go pick it up myself. Might pick me up some end tables too. Maybe some new picture frames. And something small that is wacky, cheap, and vaguely Swedish.

*I can't deal with used couches because I assume Horrible Things have happened on them. And slipcovers are ugly, or I just can't make them fit right. Meanwhile, the stuff at Rooms to Go and similar places is uncomfortable and cheap-looking, but still kind of pricey. I'd rather just deal with IKEA.
posted by emjaybee at 11:11 AM on August 24, 2016

Oh! I also forgot to mention. For small couches, Urban Outfitters online apartment section is actually remarkably decent. I have a modern design from there that becomes a twin bed with the back cushions taken off and is perfect for our small apce.
posted by dame at 11:16 AM on August 24, 2016

If you can't have enough density to support transit with a bedroom for all, then I would argue that, yes, it is immoral. Fortunately, given that streetcar suburbs are a thing, I suspect it is dense enough to support transit and what is lacking is will and good planning regulations.

Up to a point, that's true...but here is a common situation: small apartment buildings with many, many people discreetly living in each apartment. People do this because they're broke, because they're undocumented, because they would otherwise be homeless, etc. Many of these people have cars, and many have to have cars because they work weird hours in far places. Street parking? Totally screwed up. Could all those people, numbers-wise, take public transit? Sure, if there were a bus that got you to a midnight shift in an outer ring suburb and brought you back around 9am. The one time I owned a car, it was because I worked in a commuter suburb and the last bus left five minutes before I got off work.

So the underlying problem isn't exactly a density problem, it's more a vulnerability problem and a knock-on sprawl problem. To my mind, the solutions are more on the income-support and immigration-legalization ends of things, but it does mean that there's a kind of density that produces parking problems that can't be solved by transit unless it is the most utopian, affordable, on-demand transit.
posted by Frowner at 11:19 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

I remember when the Internet supposedly meant geographic supremacy was dead and we could all spread out. I remember this taking root, but then of course the tendency, like all unprofitable and human ones, was engineered out of culture at around the time we really started rocking real estate bubbles. That was around the time middle class people were urged to Live Small (for surprisingly high prices -- elegant tiny houses are expensive as fuck for what they are, yet too cheap to mortgage) because that was supposed to be more sustainable.

Funny thing, all that.
posted by mobunited at 11:23 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

The other thing about weird transit issues: if there's lots of buses to a place, you can always catch the next one. If there's two at morning rush hour, two in the evening and one weird one in between and something goes wrong, you're out an expensive cab ride.

I take an express bus to work when the weather is bad. There's only one and the alternative a transfer and then a route that goes from the poor south of the city to the poor north, stopping in downtown - so it's always really, really late and they don't bother to run enough buses on the line since the people involved are powerless.

My express bus sometimes....just doesn't show up. It's not late. It just doesn't come. You can wait as long as you like and all you'll get is chillblains, heat stroke or rained-on. This is one reason why I usually bike commute.

And of course, this bus is scheduled as it is and doesn't show up because....it serves a largely working class population, pink collar workers going home to working class neighborhoods.

We are not important and it doesn't matter if our bus doesn't come. The other express buses comes before ours. I know them all by heart at this point, and I have never noticed one to just not arrive. Only ours.

If I lived at the end of the express bus route, I'd be really fucked. As it is, if I take the express bus home, I get home about 45 minutes after my work day ends. If I walk, it takes about that long. If I take the transfer route, it takes about 1.5 hours. But the real nuisance is that since ours is the last express bus, you don't even get on the bus until almost 30 minutes after work ends, so if it doesn't come, getting home actually takes almost two hours after the end of the work day because you've already waited around for the bus that never showed up. And that's for me, who lives close in.

Again, it's easy to see why people with weird transit needs take cars instead of the unreliable bus.
posted by Frowner at 11:28 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

thivaia: 900 square feet and old

I can relate to that problem. We have a similar sized old home, which my parents love to call "small" and "tiny". When we first moved in neither of us had lot of furniture worth keeping - an awesome heavy chrome & linoleum table, too many bookcases, and a handful of junk furniture from my student days. Once we started to look we gave up on "nice" & "modern" furniture very quickly - either too poofy and gigantic or too expensive (often both). We live in area where there was once many furniture manufacturers, so with some patience we've been able to find in charity shops well-made furniture that fits our home. We get teased about our "old" furniture (in a big city antique store our mid century modern furniture would be considerably more expensive) but it fits the house perfectly & is comfortable. Who needs big things! Small is beautiful!
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:34 AM on August 24, 2016

You are thinking too small. Are things set up to make transit annoying now? Yes, because we privileged cars. But if you are living in a magic land where everyone gets bedrooms then this magic land can also include trains and clusters of some types of work (so trains are easy) and distribution of smaller types of places, so people can walk there. The way things are isn't ordained; we can change them. So let's change them all the way instead of coming up with excuses to use more resources than we really need to, especially under the guise of caring about poor people. People worked long hours before we loved private cars so much we decided storing them on public property was a human right. I am sure we can figure something out.
posted by dame at 11:34 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

As someone who has always lived in small spaces and loves Ikea.. I find some of the comments in this thread infuriatingly bourgeois. Oh, they're just things, darling, you can always get more. Simply browse Apartment Therapy and Pinterest for cute little weekend projects!

If I (and many, many people) want to continue improving my career, I have to be in an urban area, and in those areas each year I am asked to pay more and more money for smaller and smaller spaces. That's a fact. Implying that everyone who dreams of more than 500 sq ft for their family is an automaton who fills the hole in their soul with beige crap is.. well, I guess I saw Fight Club too when I was in my 20s.

I am guessing that generally everyone in this thread is on the losing end of current income inequality. When you shame people for wanting an actual stove, for goodness' sakes, you're just doing the work of the gluttonous rich for them.
posted by jess at 11:46 AM on August 24, 2016 [11 favorites]

We live (2 adults, 2 kids) in a small 2-bedroom 1950's bungalow. A small house with small rooms means that most of our furniture are antiques, IKEA, or home-made.

Anything from IKEA made of solid wood or real plywood (not the particle board stuff) is usually sturdy stuff, and the finishes wear pretty well.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:35 PM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure we're talking about the same definition of walkable. When I say walkable, I mean physically pleasant, adequate pedestrian parking, zero risk of injury or death by motor vehicle,* utopian/affordable/on-demand transit, affordable housing near workplaces, etc. This is not something I have seen approached in any city with a six-digit population in the USA, but I can't really speak to elsewhere.

*Motor vehicle related crashes in Minneapolis in 2014: 7 killed, 4,225 injured. And you're right, Minneapolis is doing well, relatively speaking.
posted by aniola at 1:24 PM on August 24, 2016

aniola: zero risk of injury or death by motor vehicle

Zero? Aim for the stars, why don't you. I consider Dutch cities to be quite walkable, but we'll never make that bar.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:44 PM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm wondering if cooking at home is transitioning as a marker of wealth and status. Changing from a connotation of "I can't afford to eat out every night" to "I can afford a home with a fully equipped kitchen" (with a side-order of enough free time to cook as a leisure activity).

Nah. "You're poor because you're a spendthrift for not cooking beans and rice at home for every meal" is too convenient a stick to beat the struggling with. I mean, the reality may change (or, really, revert, as others have pointed out), but the rhetoric won't.
posted by praemunire at 2:15 PM on August 24, 2016

adequate pedestrian parking

Maybe I'm dumb but what is pedestrian parking?
posted by Justinian at 2:29 PM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

All I know is I would take the tiny space over the big space if it was quiet and I could live alone. Introverted me would much rather face the challenge of how to store and reach stuff than the challenge of dealing with roommates and all the drama they inevitably generate !
posted by WalkerWestridge at 2:45 PM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

- "Vision Zero" is actually a movement in transportation planning (but it usually refers just to zero deaths)
- Pedestrian parking is basically just places to sit and rest when walking (usually benches)... but I call it pedestrian parking because it highlights just how necessary and oftentimes absent it is.

Urban planning and transportation planning go hand in hand. I would actually like to know what the population and housing density would need to be to sustain adequate housing in a walkable environment.
posted by aniola at 2:56 PM on August 24, 2016

HEY YOU!

me?

YEAH YOU!

yeah?

STOP MAKING THE BEST OF IT!
posted by Joseph Gurl at 3:12 PM on August 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

I do take umbrage at man-bun-boy - no institution should validate that hairdo.

The man-bun perfectly epitomises when hipster culture lost any redeeming qualities it had; some time after it stopped being about being into too-obscure math-rock bands and started about being into types of meat. And denim curation.
posted by acb at 3:27 PM on August 24, 2016

Maybe I'm dumb but what is pedestrian parking?

Like, you park in the exact same space every day at work for no good reason.
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:30 PM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Micro apartments are exactly what the planet needs and are more than sufficient for our human purposes. Having a big house with a big yard is exactly why traffic congestion has been a problem in every major city for the past half-century, and it's why trillions of dollars are constantly being pumped into sealed road infrastructure for privately-owned vehicles instead of into public transport. Big houses are an unsustainable waste of resources and what purpose do they serve anyway? Oh hey nice big house you've got here, it is 90% empty floor space, enjoy your mopping. If you want open spaces and natural sunlight go stand on a fucking hill with your mouth open and hopefully a roast duck will fly into it.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:40 PM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

The apartment I share with my partner is about 450 sq feet. It's mostly comfortable, but I'm tired of having so little space for two people. It's punishingly expensive, too.

Judging by a lot of the comments here, I guess it must sound very privileged of me to not love having a small apartment, to want a place where I can own things. I don't know why people like me feel bad about living someplace smaller when other people live in even smaller spaces, and do it with a smile. Why, with a little creativity I could make this place feel so darn cozy.

This is why I always bristle at articles about some guy working in Silicon Valley and living out of a storage crate, or something. It normalizes this idea that only the truly privileged want much more than the bare minimum. Because of course, all you really need is space for a place to sleep and a hot plate. Just like how all you really need to stay fed for a week is a bag of potatoes and a whole chicken! Which you cook on your hot plate, I guess. I'm living in the lap of luxury by those standards.

Yes, with just a little willingness to be flexible, why, you can be happy anywhere! Only teponaztli can make teponaztli sad about his living space.
posted by teponaztli at 3:49 PM on August 24, 2016 [14 favorites]

Hmm, yeah. I'm pretty lucky to have a (non-basement) studio for what I'm paying, where I am. It's got a good layout and some attractive features that make it better than just a box, and I've made it pleasant enough for my liking (yes, have some Ikea, mixed in with second-hand finds and a couple of inherited pieces - my white MICKE desk disappears against the wall, which I appreciate, and I've got a SAMTID I love for its adjustability. I mean I don't usually move it around much, but I could).

I don't usually feel cramped, but I do sometimes wish for a separate bedroom, because a) as a person for whom sleep is a challenge, it's nice to be able to split day off from night, and b) having a non-human visitor (unfortunately, have been having to deal with this) can do a number on you if you're on the nervous side.

(I would love a little juliette balcony for morning coffee, but that's just being greedy, given our short summers. Am in a walkable neighbourhood with a park, and close to transit, it is kind of a jackpot scenario. I'm grateful. I've been thinking about moving somewhere a little cheaper, but it's looking like that means taking my chances with bedbugs or forgoing natural light.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 7:07 PM on August 24, 2016

As someone who lives in 425 square feet as a family of two adults and a baby, my issue is that the designs just aren't very good. A chair on the wall? Ikea sells folding chairs; I know because they were our guest seating for a year. And yes, Ikea, we have already considered having our guests sit on the floor or stand. We were turning to your catalog for a better idea. in my opinion, some of this criticism is well deserved.
posted by slidell at 8:23 PM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Having the kids' beds in the living room:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooo

What were they thinking?!
posted by Omnomnom at 2:55 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

People have been hanging chairs on the wall since at least the 18th century. The Shakers hung up all their chairs, partly because they liked the uncluttered look and partly because it made it easier to keep the floors clean.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:41 AM on August 25, 2016

The Shakers hung up all their chairs, partly because they liked the uncluttered look

I mean, yeah, the floor is less cluttered, but now the ceiling looks cluttered. Personally I have always appreciated having uncluttered ceilings, a sort of oasis for the eyes amidst my mess.
posted by OnceUponATime at 6:57 AM on August 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

I would be ok with hanging up chairs if I had seriously tall ceilings, but otherwise all I would be doing is creating more places to bang my head into in the dark. Maybe the Shakers were short?
posted by Dip Flash at 7:01 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

I spent last night assembling a bathroom vanity from IKEA and was surprised at the high quality of it. There's a lot of cheap flimsy stuff at IKEA, but you can find quality if you look hard enough.
posted by blue_beetle at 7:24 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Kallax, successor to Expedit, a beloved shelving system. Both seem to be perfectly sized for milk crates.

And dog. [my house; earlier today]
posted by schmod at 9:59 AM on August 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

I was mainly struck by the obnoxious preponderance of grey this season.

What, would you prefer beige? I really miss my grey house now that I'm back in beige apartments. *tears*
posted by LizBoBiz at 10:08 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

What, would you prefer beige?

Grey is just beige that went to grad school.
posted by sonascope at 2:35 PM on August 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

What do I need with so much room?

Library space. Duh.

My one person 48 square metre apartment is liveable enough, but if i could spare the money and hassle, I wouldn't mind getting a slightly bigger house, one with a decent bathroom rather than just a shower/toilet room, perhaps one or two rooms to use as study and guest room and as said, more space for books.

I don't think it's unreasonable or selfish to actually want more space than one strictly speaking "needs", room to grow or play around in.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:53 PM on August 25, 2016

It's all just stuff.

And this sort of hippy thinking annoys me as well, even setting aside the issue that not everybody can have this cavalier attitude towards replacing their possessions, because it would at the very least vex enormously had I had to replace a library built up over more than three decades.

Stuff is only just stuff if you don't care about it.
posted by MartinWisse at 4:01 PM on August 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

I was thinking about this thread and the fact that I've never actually been in a tiny apartment or known anyone who lived in one. That's just the nature of living in a depopulated city where we have more houses than people but I was searching around and there are some new buildings that actually have efficiencies for rent. This one is right across the street from my office and actually wants $1300 a month plus utilities for a 500 square foot unit. That's more than our mortgage on four bedroom house and you only get one room. I realize that that much money is normal in other parts of the country/world but it's pretty shocking here in western PA.
posted by octothorpe at 5:52 PM on August 25, 2016

Those Kallax shelves are hugely popular because of their flexibility, and I don't get why Ikea doesn't apply that same design logic to their other product lines (or why even why they keep messing around with the sizes/configurations that the Kallax is available in).

True story: as I was scrolling past this comment, my hand was resting on ... the 2x2 KALLAX in my daughter's room.

IKEA is really ubiquitous.

The thing about micro-apartments in big cities is that so far they have not turned out to be particularly affordable, e.g., $2650/mo. for 250 sq ft. (making the various tradeoffs, $2650/mo. will get you a decent human-sized studio or a downmarket one-bed, even in Manhattan.) So the movement seems to be primarily about making excuses to lower the already low floor on what constitutes, say, an NYC apartment.

I've observed before that in so-called "micro" apartments, you seem get 50% of the floor space and save maybe $100-200 on the rent. So, instead of paying $2500 for 700 square feet, you pay $2350 for 350 square feet. This makes the per-square-foot cost substantially higher, but I suppose there's a baseline cost for building and servicing "an apartment", regardless of size (wiring, plumbing, lighting, framing, HVAC, etc). This also happens with studio apartments.

Stuff is only just stuff if you don't care about it.

Wasn't it George Carlin who said, "other people's stuff is s--t, but your s--t is your STUFF!"
posted by theorique at 6:40 AM on August 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Grey is just beige that went to grad school.

Gray is goth that got a day job.
posted by Celsius1414 at 7:40 AM on August 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

I think the thing about private bedrooms is that they can (and I think should) be really small. That way everyone can have a private bedroom without necessarily a huge apartment. Room for a bed, storage space for clothes, maybe a small desk. Privacy and a door you can shut is really good, but it doesn't have to be huge (for either kids or adults).
posted by Salamandrous at 7:44 AM on August 28, 2016

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