Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: small space

  • Les chambres de bonne

    This evening in French class we discussed a Parisian apartment type called the chambre de bonne. The direct translation is “maid’s room”, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. A small one-room apartment that is found on the top floor of bourgeoisie apartment buildings. Indeed, nearly one-third of Paris’ entire supply of chambres de bonne are in the wealthy 16th arrondissement.

    Their original function was to house servants. The reason they were on the penthouse floor is because, when they emerged in Paris in the 1830s, the elevator hadn’t yet been invented. And so this was the least desirable floor. The people staying in these rooms typically worked for the people living on the lowest floors in the same building. That’s where you wanted to be. Fewer stairs.

    Fast forward to today, and it is estimated that Paris has somewhere around 114,000 chambres be bonne (also known as chambres de service). They are also occupied by a broad cross section of different people:

    But it means living small. The smallest allowable size for an apartment in Paris is 9 m2 (area) or 20 m3 (volume). Meaning, even if the surface area is under the 9 m2 threshold, it might still be able to pass as livable if the ceilings are tall enough. But under these figures, and the place can’t be rented. And supposedly, about half of Paris’ chambres de bonne do not meet these minimum thresholds.

    These requirements are immediately interesting to me — not only because they’re much smaller than what we allow in Toronto — but because most people don’t think of real estate in terms of volumes. Ceiling heights, yes. But when have you ever seen or measured the volume of an apartment? It’s clearly appropriate in this instance given that many of these apartments sit under sloping rooflines.

    But the most interesting question, I think, is whether this housing type is functionally obsolete. On the one hand, Paris is an expensive city, and these apartments represent what is likely the most affordable housing option. Go on YouTube and you’ll find lots of students giving tours of their compact room-apartments. On the other hand, census data shows that occupancy within his housing type has been steadily declining since at least the 1960s:

    Based on these figures from 2011, only about 17,300 chambres de bonne are occupied as a principal residence. This doesn’t seem like a lot for a big city like Paris. (It’s around 1.25% of its entire housing supply based on my rough math.) The rest of these apartments appear to be vacant, ineligible for renting, or serving as a secondary space for owners in the same building.

    This represents an ~85% vacancy rate, which begs the question: Is there something more productive that Paris could be doing with all of this under-utilized penthouse space? Though perhaps it’s helpful to start with: would you live in 9 square meters or 97 square feet? This is smaller than the minimum size of a parking space in Toronto.

    Photo by Matt Boitor on Unsplash; Charts: Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme

  • 2.6 meters wide

    The width of a standard parking space in Toronto is generally 2.6m. I say generally because it depends on a few other factors, such as whether it’s “obstructed” or whether it’s being accessed off a substandard drive aisle. But for the purposes of this post, let’s agree that the width of a standard Toronto parking space is 2.6m.

    The reason I mention this is because Onexn Architects has recently completed a 2.6m wide cafe in Shenzhen called Joys. Pictured above, the 9 square meter space used to house an air conditioner repair shop.

    Now, some of you are probably looking at the photos and thinking that this maybe isn’t such a big deal. But small spaces force you to be creative.

    Look at the grey exterior paving that creates the impression that the cafe is spilling out onto the sidewalk. And look at how they used an illuminated 5 meter tall canopy to try and accentuate the space.

    In some places and in cities, a retail space like this might easily become forgotten space. But here, it was something worth designing.

    Photography by Li Jinhui via Dezeen

  • Residence and art gallery in one

    I love this article in Designlines Magazine about how Lawrence Blairs (owner of Atomic Design) has setup his 65 square meter one bedroom condo to serve as both a place to live and an art gallery.

    The main living area is equipped with white vinyl screens that pull down to conceal the kitchen and other private areas, and make it feel like a white-walled gallery space. There’s naturally also a projector on the ceiling.

    Supposedly it takes him about 30 minutes to prepare the space before an event. Here is a photo by Arash Moallemi via Designlines:

    You don’t necessarily need a lot of space to do the things that you may want to do. You just need to be creative. Do you think that developers should offer more creative space solutions as part of their standard offering?

  • Rethinking the tower

    The Ryerson City Building Institute recently published a new report called, Rethinking the Tower: Innovations for Housing Attainability in Toronto.

    It looks at four possible approaches to improving housing attainability/affordability in the city:

    Micro Living: Well-designed micro units can offer a cost-effective alternative to conventional apartments, particularly in central locations where higher land costs can be a barrier to affordability.

    Shared Space: Co-living, where residents share amenities and services, can improve affordability and create a sense of community, particularly in walkable, transit-connected neighbourhoods where housing costs are high.

    Home Unbundling: Features, finishes and amenities unbundled from the unit price of condominiums can allow greater choice and reduced costs for homebuyers.

    Equity Options: With more households renting, and the transition from renting to owning growing ever more challenging, new shared-equity models can help families invest in their home, even if they rent.

    In addition, the report also provides a number of project case studies from around the world. If you’d like to download a copy, you can do that here.

  • Going paperless

    Last week I picked up an Epson document scanner with the hope of going paperless in my home office. I know I’m late to this party, but just hadn’t gotten around to researching and selecting the right machine. Manually filing papers is passé, time consuming, and impractical in smaller living spaces.

    Let me tell you: I am so impressed by how quickly I was able to clear off my desk and throw everything directly into Google Drive and Evernote. Now I have an empty desk and I can access any of these files from my phone. Decluttering is a great feeling.

    I am sure that many of you are already doing this, but if you aren’t, consider investing in a quality scanner with a good automatic document feeder that does double sided scans. If the process is quick and painless, you’ll be more likely to do it on a regular basis. That was my rationale at least.

    One of the things I like about living in a smaller space is that it forces you to live more minimally, which is something I am constantly aspiring to do. For me, going paperless is a step in that direction.

  • Maximize your space with square foot hours

    I am more than happy to trade-off living space (that I don’t really need) for a better location. It means I get the benefit of driving less and enjoying the city more.

    But as more of us move to urban centers, we are finding ourselves having to do more with less space. Often this means creating flexible and multi-purpose spaces.

    One strategy for this that I really like – which I just learned about through 5 Kids 1 Condo – is the idea of square foot hours. Here’s how it works:

    “The concept behind ft2hours (square-foot hours) is to add a time-based measurement to how we assess and use our space. So if your 10′ x 12′ bedroom is used only eight hours a day (i.e., when you’re sleeping), your actual usage is 120 ft2 divided by three (one-third of the day), which is just 40 ft2hours of used space.”

    In many ways, this happens intuitively. If you really want to maximize a space, you figure out how to use it more often throughout the day. But I like the idea of applying some math to it.

    Of course, this runs counter to the notion that some spaces should be reserved for specific uses. In the case of a bedroom, it’s sleeping and sex. This is so that your mind doesn’t start associating it with things like work, which might start to disrupt your quality of sleep. But perhaps that’s about to become an anachronism in the modern city.

    Without having the above formula in mind, I have thought along similar lines for my own apartment.

    When I think about where I spend most of my waking hours, it’s bouncing between the kitchen and the living room. And yet my kitchen isn’t up against the windows; it’s recessed towards the back. Instead, my bedroom – where the blinds are almost always drawn – got the windows. (Access to light is a code requirement.)

    If it were up to me, I would have flipped my bedroom and the kitchen. But typically in the real estate world, “recessed bedrooms” are considered less desirable. 

    I don’t think I’ve heard many people complain about a recessed kitchen, but maybe that will change once we start thinking more about things like square foot hours.

  • How small is too small?

    I was up early on Sunday morning and I tweeted this out:

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    It’s a link to a Dwell article about a New York family of four that lives in a 620 square foot apartment. It’s technically a one-bedroom apartment but the way they have it set up is that the two kids share the bedroom and the parents sleep in the living room similar to as if it were a studio apartment.

    And my question in the tweet was, could you do it?

    Part of the reason the article caught my attention was because I currently live in a 640 square foot apartment – but as a family of one. And not surprisingly it’s more than enough space for me. Would I still feel the same way if it were a family of two? I believe so. But what about if it were a family of 3 or 4? I suspect it wouldn’t be as effortless, though certainly not impossible.

    I love the idea of distilling one’s life down to only what is absolutely necessary. And if you happen to live in a city, like New York, where the median price of a one-bedroom apartment is somewhere around $3,400 per month, there can certainly be lifestyle advantages to doing more with less.

    So I’d like to re-ask the question here to the Architect This City community: Could you do it? How minimalist could you go?

  • smallspacesblog:

     63.02º House by Schemata Architects

    I know this is Japan before I even open it.