Interior Design for Small Apartments. Space Saving Hacks for Studio and One Bedroom Apartments

1. Introduction: If you live in a small apartment, you typically have three questions about your space. One is, where do I store all my things in a way that doesn't make this already small space look even smaller. Number two is, how do I make the same square meters or square feet wear multiple hats. How can I make the same square meters be a bedroom, a living area, a cooking area with friends an entertainment area, a children's playground, and so many more things. And then finally, how do I deal with all these different pressing spatial problems in a way, that leaves my apartment looking more beautiful. In this class, I will be teaching you the fundamentals of small spaces, topics like natural light, how do I make the space look bigger, flexible furniture, compact furniture are all topics that tiny spaces deal with. The way I'll teach you, is by going through the design process of a 33 square meters or 361 square feet appartment. You'll be watching over my shoulder and sometimes into my head, how I sketch and 3D model different types of solution for the space and how I tackle those spatial problems. My aim for this class is to help you solve real pressing spatial problems. So i'll be teaching you not so much what furniture to buy but how to think about your space. When you start designing a new space, "Why" matters a lot more than "what". Hi, my name is Ana Marcu and I'm a licensed architect in Vienna, Austria. And my background is in architecture and building science. If you've seen any of my other classes, you know that, how spaces make people feel, is a topic, very important to me. Living in spaces that feels small makes us feel small. Small spaces are also often enough hard to furnish. So they're not just small, but frequently enough also quite ugly. And helping you to change that is a topic very dear to my heart. This class is meant for people who live in small spaces. Each section of the class has a class project prompting you to apply in your space what you have learned in the class. I encourage you to take notes, put photo collages together, do Pinterest boards and sketch on your floor plan. By the end of this class I want you guys to feel empowered to solve spatial problems no matter what small space you live in. 2. The Humans And The Space : Whenever you design a new apartment, you really need to understand the two parties involved coming together. On one side are the humans and on the other, the space that they are going to inhabit. When it comes to the humans, you want to ask yourself or the people living in a number of questions like: How many people live there? What their needs of intimacy are, and privacy? How they currently live? What their activities at home are? How do they want to live in the future? What they might want to do in the future? Do they want to cook more? Or have more people over? What is that they currently struggle with? What are the limitations that they currently feel they have at home? How might their situation change? Might they have a job that requires them to travel a lot and therefore not be at home? Or might they have a family member that is moving out or perhaps a family member that is moving in, like an elderly parent. What do they want more or less of? What do they currently perceive as problems? So there are many, many things that need to be considered and you will have to consider not just the current situation, but the future situation too, so that perhaps if you already make some design changes, you can incorporate the future needs into these design changes as well. When it comes to understanding the space, which you are about to design or inhabit, you really need to have a couple of informations. First of all, if you haven't been there yet, you really need to walk in this apartment and really take in what is it that you like or don't like about it. Because the things that you do like will have to get a prime highlight into your design. You also need a floor plan. A floor plan that really tells you the exact dimensions of this apartment. So you know how big certain furniture pieces need to be and where they can be located. Additionally to that, you will need to know the solar orientation of the windows, so you know, if they're facing north or south, you might have to plan for curtains or shutters if they're facing south. If they're facing north you need to be aware that they will never have direct sunlight, which might be good for a pantry or a kitchen, but not necessarily for a workspace. You might also want to know where the air shafts are or the water pipes, or the gas pipes, these things tell you if you happen to change the location of the kitchen, that there might be some additional works that need to be done. You might want to know where the electrical sockets are and the light switches just to make sure that you're not going to cover them with furniture or for the placement of certain light pieces. You might also want to know what the structure of the building is and where the structural walls are located. What is this building made of? Is it brick? Is it concrete? Where are the structural walls in regard to your apartment and where are the partition walls? What is it that you can take down and what is it that you can't? What else might you need to know? The floor location in the building is also important. There will be a difference if your apartment is in the attic or if it's on a lower floor. If it's in the attic, then the surface of the apartment will be used differently than if it's exactly the same apartment on a lower floor. You will need to know the height of the ceiling. Of course, apartments with a bigger ceiling height offer more opportunities than ones that are lower. Typically, an apartment is about 2,50 to 2,80 meters high. If you live in a mid-century building, let's say nineteenth-century, it's possible that your apartment has three or four meters ceiling height. This is definitely going to pose some opportunities, which need to to be taken into account in your design. So now you have a set of needs and wants and desires from the people living in, that need to be married with the constraints and the opportunities of this apartment. And this marriage is going to give you a set of design decisions that you need to take in order to solve the problems of the people living in. For a class project, I'd like you guys to ask yourself the questions in the class. How would you like to live in your space? Find a floor plan of your space and identify its opportunities and limitations. How does it match with how you want to live? Brainstorm freely. If you could change anything in the apartment, big or small, what would it be? 3. Preview and Prioritize: So now that we have this list of design decisions, you might want to figure out what is more important and what is less important. Often things that appear quite important tend to lose their importance in the grand scheme of things. How I would recommend you to prioritize them is to think about two things: the amount of impact that they have in the quality of the space, the amount of effort that they will need, the amount of financial effort, time effort, the coordination effort, and so on. So what I would recommend you to do is to make an impact effort graph. I didn't come up with this. I've also learned it from other smarter people than me, but what an impact effort graph is going to do is to help you figure out on one side of which problems are more pressing than others, and on the other. which of these problems is going to take more time, energy, money, and effort, and which one is going to take less? It's just a simple x and y-axis. And the x-axis is the "impact", and on then the y-axis is the "effort". And now you can place all these strategic decisions in this impact effort graph by deciding, are they high impact or low impact, are they high effort or low effort? And where you want to start with your design. With high impact, low effort design decisions because they will make a big difference in the quality of your home, while costing you very little time, energy, and money. And then plan for the high impact, high effort. So now that you decided which design decisions are going to make the biggest impact and will take the least amount of effort from you, you also want to think about how it's going to impact other areas of your house. If you, for example, decide that you are going to make a bigger wardrobe in the entry area because your corridor is really large and you could put a wardrobe there will this impact the amount of furniture that you have in your bedroom? Perhaps you can have a smaller wardrobe there. If I take down the wall between the living room and the bedroom, it will affect not only how the living room looks, but also how the bedroom looks too. If you change the orientation of the kitchen, how is this going to impact the living room? If you place a piece of furniture in an area of your house, how is it going to relate to the circulation? Can you walk around it? How's it going to relate to the other pieces of furniture? Does it block the entry to the balcony? Is it in the middle of the corridor? How is it going to relate to the other surfaces, pieces of furniture, and humans in the house. It's very difficult to take a design decision in, like a laboratory, vitro situation. Whenever you decide something in the kitchen, this is going to impact the living room. And whatever you change in the living room is going to impact the bedroom or the bathroom. So when making design decisions about your home, always think about the implications it will have on the rest of the house. Try to imagine yourself in the house in the new conditions. Will your design decisions solve one problem? Perhaps it solves more than one problem. Or by solving one problem, it will create other problems. Always think about this. But if you do not have enough budget to change an apartment completely, This doesn't mean you have to live in terrible conditions and you can still change parts of your apartment and still create a better living situation for yourself. When you are dealing with a physical space, you really need to know what the space is going to look like before you take the decision to start building. It's a very difficult to erase a concrete wall or the row of tiles in the bathroom, or the location of your bathtub once it's been built. So what you want to do is plan and design these things in another medium. What architects are typically doing is they use sketching or they use 3D modeling, something that I'm gonna show you later on in this class, or use physical models. Personally, I'm not a physical model kind of person. I'm better at glueing my fingers together than I am and building physical models, but with 3D modelling and quite good. And I'm gonna show you how that looks like later on in this class. If you can sketch and you can sketch in scale, that's great. If you can use a 3D modelling software to design your apartment, even better. If you don't have any sketching or 3D modeling skills, What I would recommend you is to use physical cardboard boxes or any kind of props that you have to really show you how something will look like in a physical space. So let's say you want to buy a nightstand that is of certain dimensions, where you might want to use a cardboard box and cut it in those dimensions and place it where you want it to be placed. And therefore, you would have a kind of physical representation, of what that nightstand looks like, or how it relates to other pieces of furniture. And see if that makes sense for you. It might be that you will see for the first time that it is a lot lower than the bed. Or you might see that it has a different color than the other pieces of furniture. And there might not be something that you really like. There are many things that you will start discovering what you set props in your environment. Class project. Put all the design decisions from point 3 in the previous segment on an" impact/ effort" graph. Make a list starting with the decisions in the high impact, low effort category. What would you implement on first? 4. Scale and Dimensions: In order to explain the concepts of the class better, I selected a floor plan on which I'm going to show you how they apply and how the room atmosphere changes with each intervention. Equally, you at home should have a floor plan of your home which you receive when you moved in or bought the apartment. To be sure you don't tamper with any legal documents, make sure you make a copy of your floor plan so you can sketch on it, at free will. Because I live in Europe my floor plan is in the metric system, but I will do my best to translate most of the important measures in the imperial system for my students from Liberia, Myanmar and the US, the last three countries in the world who still use it. A flow plan typically is an orthogonal section through the walls. The section is at the height of around 1.5 meters or 4.92 feet above the floor level. This matters because you also want to see the location of the windows and doors in the floor plan. Imagine if this section were lower than this, the window in the bedroom for example, would not be visible. So we want to have a section at a level where we can see the location of all the windows. The plan should have a scale. You see here on the left side that the scale of my floor plan is 1: 100. That means that 100 centimetres in real-life are represented by one centimetre on my paper space. As 100 centimetre make one meter, one meter in real life is one centimetre on my paper. You can also check this with your ruler by placing it on top of your scale. If one centimetre on your ruler is one unit on your scale than the floor plan is 1:100. Then you can place your ruler on top of the floor plan and check the length of one of your rooms. And you can see that indeed the bedroom is 3.7 meters long. It is also possible that your floor plan is drawn in a scale of 1:200, which means that two meters in real life, represented by one centimeter on your paper. For the students of the class who use the imperial system. Here are the closest corresponding scales. The equivalent of 1:100 scale in the imperial system is the eighth inch scale, which is actually 1=8,33. And for the 1: 200, we have the sixteenth inch scale, which really means 1= 16.66. Let's have a look at the floor plan and do a quick walk-through. We start at the entryway. On the right side, we have a bathroom. In front of the entryway is the door to the bedroom. Next up is the living area. And finally, we have the kitchen. Typically the floor plan comes with dimensions. But if your floor plan doesn't have all the dimensions you see here, you might want to measure your apartment yourself and put these dimensions in. If you want to learn more about measuring your floor plan, head to my class, home office interior design and have a look at the section called "measure the space". Let's have a look at some important dimensions of this floor plan. The apartment is 6.5 meters long and 5,3 meters wide, which is 21.32 feet by 17.38 feet. Both the bedroom and a living room are 3.2 meters wide, which is 10.49 feet. And also looking at the distance between the window and the adjacent walls to see if I can typically fit any wardrobes in the corners. A wardrobe is about 60 centimetres wide, which is 1.92 feet. And I see that the bedroom has about 80 centimetres, which is 2.62 feet on the left and the right side of the window, which tells me that this would be possible. If the window is too close to the corner, then the wardrobes have to be fitted in the back. I'm also noticing that the bathroom is only 1.5 meters, which is for 4.92 feet wide, which tells me that I can't really add a bathtub there, but it has room for a generous shower. What else am I noticing? A see a balcony sliding door, which is great because the door is not taking more space away from the living room, when I open it. Here, I have the surface of each area in the apartment, both in meters and in feet. The bedroom is 11.84 square meters, which makes 127.44 square feet. And the total apartment is 361.65 square feet or 33.60 square meters. As you can see, it's a very, very small apartment. Typically, I would also want to mark on my plan the location of light switches and sockets, as well as water and gas pipes, water and ventilation shafts. They usually tell me where the bathroom in the kitchen sink and other utilities should be located Because the further the utilities are from these shafts and pipes, the more works you need to plan, which can add to the cost. But at this stage, this information is not very important. I also want to know the state of the building in which the apartment is located. If it's an old or fairly new building, as well as the materials from which the building was made. Is it a concrete pillar structure with lightweight partition walls? Is, it's an eighteenth-century brick house? This is very important because houses that are more than a century old offer all kinds of surprises when you remove floors or take down walls and you might need the support of other specialists. I also want to identify what walls are load-bearing and which ones are not essential to the structure of the house? What are the walls that could be taken down without any structural implications? This allows me to understand what are the constraints under which I can design. Every house is different, so each apartment needs to be looked at individually. But for the sake of our exercise, the middle walls do one separating the bedroom and the bathroom, as well as the living room and the bedroom can be taken down. Class project. Familiarize yourself with the floor plan. Identify the scale, rescale the floor plan so you can sketch on it. For example, make a copy two times bigger. Understand the measurements. Can you tell how long each wall is? 5. Sketching Tools: Whenever I start a new project, I will start by sketching on the floor plan in order for me to understand what the space is really like, what the opportunities, what the constraints of the floor plan are. Sketching is a very important part of the design process. I feel like I can think a lot better about the solutions if I just start sketching. The thing I like about sketching the most is that it helps you put your thoughts in order. It really makes you focus and narrow down what the opportunities and possibilities are on that floor plan. I typically work on a 1:50 floor plan, but I was afraid that you guys watching this class might not be able to see everything that I'm doing. So I printed the floor plan a little bigger than that, 1:25. 1:25 typically that means 25 centimeters in real life, means one centimeter on your paper space. It's quite big for a sketch, but you know, for this class it will do. You can print it at whatever size you feel would be easy for you to sketch on. 1:50, 1:20, 1: 25 should be, should be useful. In the beginning, the sketches can be like massive doodles, not really differentiating themselves from what a child would do. But as your pen is moving on the paper, more and more ideal start emerging, more and more concepts. You start to really understand how people could live there and how they would move, and you should not ignore it. Try to immerse yourself in the sketching activity as much as you can. What I'm using for sketching are the typical tools, I guess. I'm just going to show you what I'm using. I use a piece of semi-transparent paper. It doesn't really matter what brand it is. But the important thing is you can still see your floor plan through the see-through paper. I usually put it on top of the plan and I stick it with tape to my workspace. I wanna make sure that my sketch paper isn't moving. It's quite slippery and it can easily move from the location you initially placed it on. My favorite pens to work with are mechanical pens. I have these from Koch-I-Noor which is like a Chech brand. I absolutely love them. They have been doing the exact same pen for 10-20 years and the design hasn't really changed much. They work incredibly well. I've had this one for at least 10 years. It's not that I really enjoy keeping things, but if it's not broken, why throw it away? And it works flawlessly. You can use different types of leads. So you can change the leads in the middle and they come in different thicknesses and also in different softness I guess. 5B for example, can be very, very soft, while 2B or 3B can be a little harder. Figure out what kind of led you like and you can use it really nicely with mechanical pens. I like this one, particularly because it's a little thicker and especially for really large sketches, can cover a lot of surface really quickly. In the middle, I think it's not a lead, it's actually charcoal. And so the lines can be a little darker than lEAD. Which actually like. For this sketch I will actually use this pen. is not very different from Koh-I-Noor, the only real difference is that the weight is actually placed towards the tip of the pencil. and I really like how it sits in your hand. I pushed the lead out a little bit and it just has this elongated kind of silhouette, which sits really well, with my long fingers. I also use a tape and an eraser. I also use a ruler. This is very helpful if you are drawing in a certain scale. As I said, if I have the scale 1: 25, then I know that four centimetres on my ruler, are a meter on my floor plan. So I know that a couch maybe is 90 centimeters, which is little bit less than this. Some wardrobe 60 centimeters is probably this much. Right? So it's kind of a orientation scale if you want, you don't want to make a wardrobe that is this big if it's actually only up to here. It's not super precise, but it gives you an orientation of what the space can do. Class project. Find some transparent paper, a ruler and your favourite pen. It's sketch time. 6. The Basic Floorplan: Hey guys, welcome to sketching my favorite part of interior design. For my sketching, I printed the floor plan that I showed you. but instead of it being in the scale 1: 100, as we discussed before, I printed in the scale 1:25. 1:100 would have been probably been this big. I thought you probably will not see much from what I am drawing. So I wanted you guys to have a better view and a better experience. And I printed the floor plan on a much bigger scale. I typically, can already sketch if it's 1: 50 or 1:33. But I thought 1:25 should be easily visible from where you are watching my sketching and probably also much easier to understand. 1:25 typically means 25 centimeters in real life, are one centimeter on your floor plan. Sketching on a floor plan can also give you a couple of inputs about scale, a couple of ideas of where you might want to go with your floor plan. But it's not a very precise tool. Which is why once you have a concept that you have sketched and knew pretty much feel confident about, you should put it immediately in CAD, in a program that is much more precise. So you can see if that really fits as you imagined or not. But sketching as an architect is a tool that fluctuates between free-flow and actual scale design. So now I start sketching. First I really like to emphasize my walls just to get a feeling of how big is this space. This is my entry door, so I'm trying to get a feeling of how people are moving into this space. I have balcony door here. Before I'm gonna draw what I imagined this place could be. First of all, this place can be arranged in many, many different ways depending on the needs of the people living in, but since we don't have a concrete information about that we're going to explore many design options and many sketches. I'm just gonna start with what I think people normally will do, in a plan like this. Just to show you what typically happens and where the problems start to rise. So for this plan, I'm assuming maybe one person or two people could move in here. What do you need? You need a bed, right? So you might draw a bed in the bedroom. Because the room is very small I'm just going to assume that the bed is the minimum standard measurement that the beds are. I think the narrowest double bed is 1,40 meters this would be 1,25 and this would be 1,50. So I'm assuming if this is the middle of the room I'm assuming something like this. Yeah, it's not super precise. I'm assuming a bed like this could be here. You need about 2,00m or 2,10m. Something like this. 1,50m... 1,40m (width). 2,10 (length). Something like this. This could be my bed, right? I'm also thinking, well, I might need some storage in this in this bedroom so I don't see a lot of space. You can't put it here. Here you don't have much space, you only have about a meter. So I'm assuming it is going to be somewhere around here. A wardrobe is about 60 centimetres wide. So I have 50 here and it's a little less. Something around here. 60 centimeters. Probably the bed is going to be a little further, further back. This is my sketch. And this is my wardrobe, maybe it has three... because this is like 2.10 to 2.20 A standard module is about 60 centimetres. So a 1,80 length. It can be somewhere... or it can be a little longer. It can be non-standard. Right? I also have to think about how am I going to open these wardrobes and still fit a human here, but this is for later on. For the living room, a lot of people will install a couch and a TV unit. So the TV unit is about the size of a wardrobe in width, so also about 60 centimetres wide. Just going to assume it is going to be up to here, maybe. And the couch is typically 90 centimetres wide. So maybe a little bit like this. So it doesn't really matter how long you make it. Couches come in all kinds of lengths and sizes. Mine is about 2,00m...2,25m. And maybe it stops here. That's my TV right there. Then a lot of people... I think kitchens are typically installed here... either they are standard or...that's where most people put them. And it's not a bad location. I think it is fine, I have my kitchen modules here. I look at the exact dimensions of the modules later. Typically a kitchen module is 60 by 60. So this should be like 2,40. I think our rooms are 320. So maybe even five modules might fit in there. This is just a little sketch, We will look into the details a little later. But I'm just trying to figure out where the certain... blocks will be positioned and what the circulation is going to be like. So I'm always, always thinking of how the human moves into the space. I'm assuming there will be some kind of a table here, either for the kitchen or for... just to eat. Is a little small or just a long one. Whatever. That's probably what a normal person or a normal human being moving in is going to think that they need, right? And usually, these layouts come from what furniture companies tell you that you need or what you see with your friends. But you never quite question, "Is this something that I really want to?" So and if you were to monitor, for example, your activities at home, you might, for example, notice that you do some things and you don't do other things. So you spend more time on things that you didn't think you need and others that you thought you might need, you don't spend so much time on. So for example, you've installed here a TV unit and you might think, yeah, I'm watching TV every night, but if you travel three times a week or four times a week, this entire room here might not be used. It took me six years to realize I was not using at least 3/4 of my living room because I was now really at home. I was travelling a lot, but also I spend my evenings away from home. So the first part of the design, the analysis of the people and thinking through your activities at home and how you want to spend your time really is important because it will make you be much more focused on what you ultimately want to have on the floor plan and not, some furniture company tells you, you should have. So this is kind of the standard, what people get when they first furnish their floor plan. And the problems start to arise when you think, right, but what if I want to work from home? Where would I install a table? I only have one meter here, so I can't... the smallest table is 60 centimeters wide. There is no place here, there is no pace here. No place here. I can't replace the kitchen table... maybe... or I can. What if I want more storage? What if this and this is not enough? What if I need storage for my skys or for my winter jackets or covers or Christmas decorations. They might not all fit in here. What if I have family coming over often? A lot of people will say, yeah, I have an extensible couch. But if you've ever slept on an extensible couch, you know that that's just not amazing. It may be like a one night possibility. But if you have somebody staying more frequently, that's not an option. Also, couches are massive things. And for our small space, I would really recommend staying away from really massive fixed furniture. But there are also other opportunities that might be more useful to you, which I think are worth exploring in this class. So I'm going to show you guys what it looks like in 3D just for you to get a sense of the space. And then we're going to explore more design options. Because not everyone understands plans or what sketches mean. I've decided to draw all my sketches and all my ideas in 3D with a program called SketchUp. Typically, I only draw in 3D plans that I know for sure the client is going to like. But because I am exploring concepts here, I'm going to go with you guys through a series of plans and 3D sketches for you to understand how a floor plan can be changed with new interventions. Let's have a look at our floor plan. Here we have the entry. Here we have our bathroom with a shower and a small sink. This is our bed with storage... wardrobe. Our kitchen is here. We have a couch and also a TV unit. And here we have our balcony exit. And this is our balcony from the outside. I've made for you guys some views from the... from inside the apartments so you can see how small it is. We start with the living room. So this is what the living room looks like from our balcony window. This is my kitchen. This is my couch here, and this is my TV unit. And if I want to have a look at the TV, this is my TV. Can look around. You can see out the balcony. And then we can look from the entry way towards our living room at the height of 160 centimeters. And this is how our livingroom looks like. It's not very big. This is our kitchen. And now let's have a look towards the bedroom. The bedroom is also quite small. Here on the right side, we have our storage. This is our cupboard here. And then we can have a look at the bathroom, which is not particularly big. And then get back to our 3D. As you can see here. This is our tiny apartment. This is what it looks like. And this is what we are going to explore for the next couple of classes. Try to sketch how your apartment is currently designed. Measure your furniture if you have to and draw it in scale on your floor plan. Try to remember basic measurements like the width of wardrobes or the couch, it will come in handy when you draw your desired plan. 7. Removing Walls And Natural Light: One of the ways to make your apartment looks bigger Is to simply tear down the walls that do not have a structural function. This only happens under certain conditions. 1. you own the apartment. 2. you do not live in a monument or any building that is culturally relevant for your community. 3. the walls that you intend to tear down have no structural function. This is something that you should not determine on your own but only together with a structural engineer or a local architect. 4. any changes that you make in your apartment will have to be approved by the administration of the city you live in and the documentation for this has to be prepared and signed by a local architect or structural engineer. This at least happens in Europe, and if you live anywhere else in the world, I would recommend you to do it this way, anyway. Why is that? Because people are prone to mistakes and mistaking a load-bearing wall with a non-load bearing wall can have a huge impact. It can put yourself, your family, your neighbours, and your neighbour's neighbours in danger. So you do not want to leave any of these to chance and you want to consult yourself with a structural engineer or a local architect. There are two more aspects you might want to consider before tearing down any walls. One is how much you appreciate privacy versus how much you appreciate the sense of space. There are two types of privacies you want to consider. One is visual, the other one is audio. Visual privacy can still be achieved once you tear down some walls. But audio privacy, it's very hard to do. So... So you want to really consider who is living there with you and how important these kind of things are to them. Another thing you might want to consider before you tear down some walls in your apartment, is how long is this desired situation going to support you? So if you know, you live in an apartment for 5-10 years and the sense of space really means something to you, great go-head. That if you know, you're going to be out of that apartment in half a year or a year and you're going to sublet the apartment to somebody else, you might want to consider in the way the apartment looks and the way it suits you is going to suit the new tenants as well. If not, they're going to be some new costs. One now for tearing them down and one later for putting walls up again. This is not a problem, but if you have a budget, you might want to consider this. One of the great side effects or removing walls is having more natural light. Besides helping you with lowering your electricity bills, having more natural light everywhere is going to improve a sense of comfort and well-being in your life. I have been stressing this in my past classes and I'm going to stress this again that seeing daylight deeply affects our mood and our hormones. Prolonged lack of exposure to natural light makes us suffer from depression and lethargy, and it severely affects our sleep-wake cycle. Having more natural light is incredibly good for our health and our circadian rhythm, boosting our optimism and energy levels. Small apartments have smaller rooms. In small rooms have a lot of dark corners. and often when we go in these rooms, we feel like we live in a shoebox. And it's not just the fact that the walls are so close to our face, but also the lack of light really supports this feeling of living in a box. And therefore, when we bring natural light into space, we don't just contribute to our health but we also contribute to this sensation, the feeling of living in a bigger space than we actually lived in before. So if you want to check in our sketch how the light would disperse in our space. I just wanted to show you quickly how this would look like. Just making the walls quickly. If we are to have this separation wall here, then our light is going to create this kind of surface. Right? So the darkest places will be in the corners and here at the back. And especially here. Probably here will be the darkest places. This is how it would basically look like. You'd have a lot of darkness in the back. This is absolutely dark because it doesn't have any kind of light. And then this is how the light would disperse in the space If we were to remove one wall, right. So if we come back to our plan and assuming that we have removed this wall here. Then the dispersion is going to be like this. The amount of light coming in will be a lot more. If we don't have this, then we won't have any more of the dark corners here, and also not the dark corners here. So although we might have a darker room in this area is going to be a lot less. And in fact, this area here is going to be flooded with light. And if we can imagine adding a piece of glass in the, here in the bathroom, then perhaps even this area can be can have a bit more light. So you see removing a wall doesn't just create a sense of space, but also floods the apartment with more light. So now we look at our space and there is way more light here. And therefore removing a wall doesn't just give you a sense of a bigger space because we are suddenly looking at more space between these two walls, but also makes you feel like you live in a more generous kind of space. Just want to show you how our 3D model looks like without the wall between the living room and the bedroom. Just for you to get a sense of what the space looks like, what a difference it actually makes. We'll just have a tour of the... apartment as it is now, very small rooms, and even with very little storage and furniture, it starts already to look quite crowded. I'm going to turn off the middle wall. The sensation is already a different one, right? So by removing the world between the bedroom and the living room, the space changes and we can definitely still create intimacy in the bedroom later on. But what I want to explore now is to see if we can do something about the bathroom wall so we can have more light inside. I'm just going to turn off our wardrobe. And now let's have a look at, at our other options. I've created a couple of variations for this bathroom wall for you, and we can discuss them a little bit. I just want to emphasize that changing the bathroom wall can't be thought about individually. You always have to think about how is this going to affect the bed or perhaps the nightstand next to it or is this is there going to be a wardrobe here? So while I'm going to show you some examples of what bathroom walls you can do. Keep in mind that they do not stand on their own. They have to come together with other design decisions in the apartment. I'm going to turn off the first bathroom wall. And I'm going to imagine a new one. For example, in this case, I've placed two glass windows on the upper part of the bathroom wall. It doesn't look like much of a difference, but considering that this room gets a lot of natural light, there is going to be some natural light coming inside as well. What about this version where this wall is about 1,85m, so it's above the average head. It creates enough intimacy in the bathroom. And you can have a glass window here. It can also be milky glass, so it can be something that you do not necessarily see-through, but allows for natural light to go in. It already creates a much bigger sense of light and transparency. I just pulled this wall a little lower now. This could of course also be an option for people who live alone or who live with a partner. And having this much transparency isn't the problem. As before it doesn't have to be a fully transparent glass. It can be milky glass, but there will be, of course, much more natural light coming into the bathroom. And it can look a lot, a lot more interesting. This issue of course, can be discussed with the owners. if this is something that they like. Some people prefer this kind of things, others want a little bit more intimacy. Of course, you can also pull it all the way down. Or you can create an interesting pattern out of window frames and save some money on the glass. Typically glass sheets this big cost quite a lot and it's a lot cheaper to install smaller pieces of glass together. The other option is to have light coming only into the shower and have more intimacy to the toilet and sink area. You can also change the direction in which you enter the bathroom. This could be interesting for people who want to make the bathroom a little smaller. This option gives you the opportunity to save 10- 15 centimetres from the bathroom length and give the bedroom a bit more space. That might not sound a lot but if you already have a very, very tiny space, 10- 15 centimetres can be quite a lot. So these are the options for the bathroom. I just want you guys to start thinking of what is possible and what might be possible or interesting for you. We're going to explore in the following classes how this bathroom wall relates to the furniture from the bedroom. Class project.With the help of a specialist identified the walls that are not load-bearing. What would your apartment look like without them? Which rooms could benefit from more natural light? Only do this step if you own the apartment. 8. Zoning: The first principle I'm going to talk about is seeing where your corridors are. And this is our entryway. Right? And if this wall where in there, then going into our apartment, I'm going to want to access various types of room. So I'm accessing the bathroom here, and probably the kitchen here, and the bedroom here, the living room here. So kind of naturally, I've created a corridor here because we naturally want to walk in direct lines. And because I have to access the Windows, there's also a corridor here. So now I have... and probably somewhere here too, because I have to access my living room and my kitchen. And then suddenly I have these surfaces that I am working with to plan, right? This kind of has to stay free in these spaces here... we'll have to see about this one, but this space here, will be probably filled with furniture. And these sides here can we furniture too. As I said, our windows here allow for these corners. So it can fit in some wardrobes If I want. So this is kind of my my corridor here. And on this corridor, ideally, I don't have any furniture or if I do it that it's not very obstructive to my to my corridor. And it doesn't have to be this strict, maybe the corridor is is a little bit like this. But just for you to kind of understand, now that we create, that we have zones where we have a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen. And these are kind of free, free of furniture types of spaces. And now this should actually help us figure out where certain furniture pieces can be. So in order to define this corridor, maybe I have a piece of storage here or maybe it's my couch facing my TV unit. Maybe here is where the kitchen storage stops or maybe my kitchen is like this. Right? Maybe I access my bed... Maybe my pet is here in the middle and the access to the bedroom is here on the side. Or my bed is here. And I access it on the side. Or my bed is this one, and I access it on the side? Or maybe I have an entire raised floor here. That is the bedroom area. This is something that you need to think of. How you are going to create a division of your spaces, even though there are no walls in between. And in the following classes, we are going to look at more ways to divide these spaces without using any walls. Let us see in 3D what I mean about corridors. I've created here a person and we're gonna let her come into the house. Now, this is definitely a corridor because she needs to access the bathroom. And once she's in, she might want to leave here coat somewhere in the space, right? So I might want to build some kind of furniture piece here where she can leave her coat. I've put here a wardrobe, but definitely this is going to be a corridor. Now, if she continues on, we might want to figure out where is she going to access her bedroom area. So definitely somewhere on the sides. Now, I want to separate my bedroom area from the living room somehow. I would like to have a little bit more privacy. And for that, I created a freestanding shelf. So now I've separated my bedroom area from the living room area. And I also have a little bit of intimacy with the shelf here. And I can see that my corridors... to get into my bedroom...are here and here. I can also put my site tables here in my bedroom, right? So now I can access my two side tables. I have a shelf or books or other kinds of things that I like to show off. I see now here two corridors: one where I can access the kitchen and also the living room area, and one where I can access my windows and my balcony and my bedroom here. It's enough of a separation here for the bedroom from the living room. But often enough, if I want to have a couch, this creates a kind of division, at least a visual division or where my attention is going away from the bedroom. And now if I want to populate my kitchen, for example, right? I could have a smaller module here, and I could have here a wall that unites both my kitchen in my living room, or a furniture kind of wall. and maybe a coffee table. My kitchen has here two modules. And now I've created this kind of corridors where this one is the main axis where my apartment is divided into main functions of the bedroom and a living room, and the kitchen that I also have, perhaps these corridors and these corridors all straight lines and all very orderly in order to make the movement in my apartment much, much easier than it would be if I would place these things all over the place. So this is what I mean by corridors. And corridors are usually straight lines and you always have to figure out, you know, if you want to get to your balcony, what's the easiest way? If you want to get to your bedroom, was the easiest way? It's always easy to notice this kind of natural paths in your apartment. So you can build around them. Class project, identify the zones of your apartment. What are the natural, easy ways to moved from doors to windows. What are your corridors? 9. Order and Alignment: When designing architecture plans, I'm always looking for ways to order my plan. For example, I can use already existing walls in my floor plan. So I can order all the other objects in my floor plan. So for example, I have this wall here. And I can use the axes that come from this place to order other element in my plan. So this, for example, might be guiding elements for my a bedroom, and these might be guiding elements from my kitchen. If my bed is in the middle, it's probably just here. I have about 30 centimeters left to my wall because I know this is about 230 and a bed is about 200 or 205. So I might just have enough room here for a freestanding shelf. So I might create a freestanding shelf here at the bottom of my bed and I might use the axis here to order other elements. in my floor plan. I might use It's 1,40m here. I might use a wider sitting element... it's not really... it's probably a small couch... a small lighter couch that has perhaps additional sitting elements next to it. Or it might be...Or, I can make my freestanding shelf a little bigger and therefore use this one is an order element. And create a bigger couch here. It's probably like this. Could be... yeah? And this could be an Ottoman. So you see, I'm always looking for ways to create a little order in my space.I might create here a wardrobe, a bigger wardrobe for my entryway, probably a wall and maybe even a small kitchen here. I think I have enough space. So these are all, all wardrobes. And now I have a relatively free space here, which I can do anything I want with. I can even make this bed to flip, to... perhaps fit in a...in a kind of wardrobe here. And then I can create a more fluent sort of space in this area to do whatever I want with. So what do I mean when I speak about guidelines? I'm basically trying to create a kind of order in my space. If you want an architect to have a headache, show him misaligned objects in the space. This might not strike you if you're not necessarily an architect but this kind of misalignments are going to come across to you subconsciously and you will feel, you will feel that something is not right with this place. So always look at how you can align objects in your space in order to create a sense of order. So for example, if I look at my bathroom here and I'd like to create a guideline to show you why this bothers me so much. You see that there is a 10-20 centimetre difference here. What I can do in my model of course, because it's still a sketching situation is I can change these volumes. So I am just going to align them to this corner. And is the same with my... Now these are just volumes. And of course a kitchen module will never look like this and I have to look at this in detail and really ask myself, how is this kitchen going to look like now that is not a 130 centimetres long, but a 150. This is definitely something I have to look into in a detailed phase if the client says he really likes this version but right now I'm just trying to align my object in space and see what makes sense and what doesn't. And the second thing that I dislike Is this misalignment between my standing shelf and the bathroom wall. So if I would bring here... you will see that my wardrobe is very strongly misaligned and that's because of my bed. I have 2,30 m here 2,30m. And my bed is probably something like 2,07-2,08m. And therefore, the 30 centimetres that my wardrobe the start to push back outside this line. It's not quite aligned, but even if I would align it, it would still be outside of this...outside of this line, right? And so now I'm I really get a massive headache. And if you show this to any architect, they'll get a massive headache. And what I can do is, of course, you can say, well maybe I don't want the shelf, maybe I want a freestanding wall or a curtain or something like that. But I was just curious if... what would I do if... if the client really wanted a shelf like this, what I would personally do is simply redesign the shelf. So in my case, I already redesign it so you don't have to sit next to me while I'm modelling. It would basically be... instead of this, it would be this. So i will just push my shelf back and I would get rid of the lower shelves. And I would use just upper shelves for storage and just as a variation to my shelf I thought about using this as a TV unit, right? You can... what this middle rod here does, is that it helps the TV to turn on whatever side you want to watch. So you can watch these TV both from your bedroom and your living room. So now if I turn on my couch, and my coffee table, now I have a place to sit and watch my TV from both sides. And what I like about this arrangement is how clear the two areas are between services, kitchen, bathroom, entryway, and actually living area. The living area is much more generous and a lot more transparent and fluid. And now I'm using this wall to be able to allow light to go through. And if I go back to my bathroom and I turn off this wall and I put on maybe this wall... So I put on this wall. Now I also have a much more luxurious looking bathroom. And if I come back to my living room, I would like to turn on this storage unit because maybe what I have here is not enough and what I have here is probably not enough for all the books and all the things that I want so maybe I'm going to keep some things on the lower area here. And I will have some shelves in this area. Currently, it's just a volume here... my library, but I can of course, detail this. And I could even say, wait, I could use this corner and align this corner here, so now I can really mark the space between my services and my living area. So if I go here, I could really align my corner to this corner. Of course, I will have to go to my library and detail it exactly how many doors, how many shelves... But I really liked the idea of having a kitchen that is very well-defined through these corners and it's very well structured, so I can understand that the kitchen ends here even if I don't have any walls. And then this is my living area. Now if I didn't want to have my couch like this and let's say I really want the old couch back. I could of course, also align this couch to this shelf. Right? So now I have some... now I have my couch which is also aligned to this standing shelf. And this is also of course, quite nice. And now we'll have a real sense of order in my a space and a real sense of clarity and easiness of the space. And things are much, much more... easy to understand and to navigate. So order is one of the most important things in design But especially for small apartments, having ordering clarity can really change that sense of hoarding and things piling on to you because there is not much storage space for them. Class project. How will you align your furniture? What pieces of furniture or walls are staple pieces and how will you arrange the rest of your design around them? 10. Compactness / Part 1: If you look up in the dictionary the word compact, you'll find that it's an adjective that describes an object that consists of parts that are positioned together closely or in a tidy way using very little space. Compact furniture or space-saving furniture, combines different furniture objects into one. So often it combines a bed with a piece of storage, and a couch, and a table and a lamp. The more pieces I can add up to my pile without taking more surface or taking away from the comfort of using all those pieces of furniture the more appreciated this compact furniture is. In our case, I'm going to talk about compactness around our bed. Not always, but in many cases, compactness can be achieved around the bed area and we are going to explore variations and look at the advantages each option has to offer. So if we look at our bedroom area, we know that it's 230 cm x 370 cm, right? How can we achieve compactness of the bed? Let's start with the mattress. Where might we position this? We initially positioned our mattress right in the middle. But what if we want to keep it closer to our bathroom wall? We can position our mattress here. So if I were to install a bed here, it might actually look like this. I am trying to define my niche here. And I'm building my bed around my mattress. And I have a surface here that is generated. That marks first of all my niche, but also it gives me some space for storage. I also realized that I don't have any nightstands so I've created this area here where I can install sockets and place my, my phone to charge, and my books, and my glasses, and my water glass and whatever else a nightstand might have. I also see that I have... I could install a drawer here and here. So why not? Let's, let's add them and look at them. So this is quite nice. I have now a bed and a storage area. And so we've created a compact storage piece/ bed. And it looks quite nice. I could spend my evenings here, but it could also be a day lounge sort of area, if I didn't have the space for a couch, let's say... can also add some kids around here. And this is my space. Just wanted to show you guys what it looks like with my two walls. So my wall at the left side... and if I turn on the front wall... now you see I've created here quite an interesting niche. And so I have storage and bed all in one. So looking at this bed, it feels like it covers a lot of surfaces, but it doesn't offer quite as much storage as I'd like. And so I'm thinking that perhaps this surface here if it were higher, I could have more storage area as well as a kind of protection paravent or protection wall from a direct view in my bedroom so I could hide my bed here behind a bigger storage piece. What would this look like? So if I were to turn off my bed here, it would probably have to look like this. I've just modeled this before I started the class, I didn't want you guys to wait for me to see how I model, but basically, this is what I thought it could look like. Basically, I have here my bed and in front I would have my storage area and I could make this an entire wardrobe, but I thought it would be even nicer if, if this wardrobe would turn into a table. So I'm going to turn off my... turn on my bed. and this is my mattress, which is hidden here, which is quite nice. I have my nightstand over here. I have my chair, which I can use, my table. And the cool thing is this that this piece of furniture also offers drawers. So I have drawers here and I even have a drawer here. So in case, I have the guest would have a spare bed for them as well. You see, I could easily put a bet here. So now I've basically used his entire surface. I have my bed, I have a guest bed,I have an office space, and some storage area. And it's quite cool, I've used this surface area very, very well. So, I mean, just imagine what else I can do with this space. Suddenly I have too much space available, right? Or maybe there's never too much space, but anyway I freed a lot of this area here. And with a little bit of planning you can make a very small area like this one here work really, really hard for you. Alright, so by now you might say: "Well, it's all good, Ana I like that I have an office here. But you know what, I don't need it or I might like to put it in my living room. And in fact, I'd really like to have more storage because two drawers here just aren't enough." And I can tell you that doing that is definitely possible. So how might our bed look like if we wanted to add more storage? Well, another option would be this version here, which is a little higher. So we have a higher construction and a storage area that also acts as a visual protection for my bed area. Right? Just gonna turn on my bed. So my mattress is placed on the bed. And here I have drawers. And I also have a drawer for my guess bed, so that still works. Then in order to access my bed, I have some steps and these steps too are drawers. And I even have some little trapdoors here where I can store more things. I'm looking at my bathroom wall and I think I can even design this bathroom wall to match my construction. So I'm going to turn this off and turn on this wall. And this will actually matches the exact line here where my storage area ends. And so it, it suddenly becomes a much more coherent element. As I said before, this doesn't have to be transparent. You can be milk-glass (translucent). But suddenly it has, it seems to be more of a one-piece then two pieces. I'm just going to show you how the drawers would look like. So I have my guest bed / drawer here, I have drawers in my staircases. and I have drawers here. So suddenly I have a lot more storage. I have storage here, and I have storage here, and I can place books and other objects here. So it's quite...now it has become quite a complex piece of construction, but it also houses a lot of my storage area. So now I've really freed the space here, but I have to move my table somewhere in this area. I definitely like my creation so far, but I wonder what else can be done with my bedroom. Are there any other ways I can make it a compact piece of furniture that includes a bed, a piece of storage, a protection... visual protection of some kind, a table. Can we add a table here? I am... I'm curious. So I'm just going to turn off this version and we're going to move to our next option, which is this one. So I have here a bed, a piece of storage underneath my bed. I have more storage here that continues from my bed. I have a table positioned right in front of my window. Right? So that's...that's quite nice. I'm taking advantage of this niche that has presented itself here, I have a table with a chair, I have storage, left and right. and I also have a bed. That's kind of neat I have to say because on one side I am marking my niche here and on the other, I am using, it's very, very well. I can work here. I have my clothes here, I can sleep here. I mean, if my apartment was this big would be quite nice except for the kitchen and the bathroom. I can fit quite a lot of things in here. So I'm just going to also show you the drawers. So you can see how this might look like if I were to put my clothes in these drawers. And I can also show you, I can also use a small ladder to access my bed. I could also design the ladder in my construction here. As I am in the sketch part of my design, I just decided to use an exterior ladder, but for sure it can create some kind of ladder piece here. Perhaps here instead of a ladder, I can use an Ottoman or an additional chair. If somebody sat next to me at the table, I could use this piece of furniture both at the seating area, as a temporary sitting area and as a support to get into my bed. So I'm quite... I'm liking this piece of furniture. So now I'm wondering, could I be housing more than two people in this apartment? Could I have more people living here? And as our structure is growing and growing in height, I think if we're making it even higher, we might be able to add more beds in this area. Let's have a look how this might be possible. I'm just going to turn off the version I created here, and we're going to move to the next version, which is this one. So instead of staying fixed with my bedroom niche, I decided to create here an entryway wall. This wall acts as a visual protection, but also it defines my entryway corridor. And when I go in, I don't necessarily look directly into the rest of the apartment. I get to hang my code somewhere here. Then I get to see and explore the rest of the apartment. And I want to create a bigger niche here in 2,30m, which I had in my bathroom here, is just not quite enough. So I'm trying to create a little bit more space for my beds. And I'm just going to turn them on. So I have decided to put here two beds. Now. I could have placed this wall here right at this margin, but I felt like I wanted to have a bit more space. Maybe I would have plugs. Or lights, some kind of nightstand area that I need for every bed. They are. I can even tell you exactly how much they are. There are 2,40. I would also want to turn on the small ladder. So now I have two beds, one on top of the other, so I can typically house four people in here. Now those who want to use a wardrobe... So now I have a wardrobe for this entire area. I'm sort of closing my niche here. On one side I have the beds and on the other, a piece of wardrobe that marks the end of my entryway corridor. So this would be quite nice. And because I have so much area for lying down here, I also think it would be nice to have another seating area which could contain more storage space underneath. But would collaborate with this area here, making it also a kind of day bed, day lounge area. On one side, I could have more guests over, and the other, I could have a bedroom and the upper area in a kind of day bed lounge area here, and leave this space for a bigger kitchen and perhaps a working area. So how else might we solve the bed situation by making things compact? For example, we can have this case where the bed is exactly two meters long and 30 centimetres (is) a freestanding shelf. There isn't much space for the nightstand, but you could theoretically use this kind of spaces. Then underneath the bed, there are drawers that you can pull out and have a bit of storage. Additional, you have storage here. And of course, a small ladder to jump into bed. So theoretically this could be a very small and compact sort of situation. And you can hide behind this, this furniture piece. And it would look really, really beautiful, at least from the living room. So you wouldn't have to look into the bedroom. It creates a kind of niche of its own. And I really like that. I also like the idea that I can hide my bed behind a piece of furniture and have some intimacy here and a place to put my things and as well as storage piece of all kinds of things. I have storage here, I have bed here, have intimacy. And I have also a lot of space for storage for. 11. Compactness / Part 2: I'm going to show you two more ways to create a compact piece of furniture in your bedroom. And I'm sure there are many, many more ways to do this. I'm just trying to spur your imagination, to think a little differently about your space and see how many ways your tiny space can actually support you. And often you don't need to move, but just think a little harder about your space. These two solutions are actually very popular in Asia. And Asia has been dealing with the lack of space for a much longer time. So some of the smartest solutions come from there. In the first one, we're going to raise the entire floor in our bedroom niche. Let's have a look. This is how it would look like. We could raise the floor 30 centimetres from the actual floor. And this would create a space of compartments with little doors where you can store things much like a bento box. And additionally, you would have a wardrobe here that you could use. This might not be for everybody. It takes a lot of kneeling. Something that Asian people are very familiar with. Europeans, not so much, but for some people, it is not a problem and could definitely solve a lot of storage and imagined how much, how many things I can actually store in this huge wardrobe here and all of these little floor drawers. If I add a mattress to this, I can make it a daybed or even a sleeping area and just look at how many places I have for storage. I have a really big wardrobe that goes all the way to the ceiling. I have drawers here and I have small trapdoors here in the floor. This is quite nice. Additionally, my raised floor really defines my niche here, my bedroom niche. So if I were to turn on the wall, you can see how clear my space is actually divided. I have my bedroom and my bathroom here. And I have quite a large space here to work with for the living room. But this could also be part of the living room during the day. So it's quite nice. I like that. It also relieves me from a lot of storage. So my living room area might be actually quite free from any kind of big furniture or wardrobes. Another thing that I would like to attention you guys when it comes to raising floors, is the distance between your new floor and the window. There is a reason why there is a distance of about 90 centimetres between your window and the floor. And that is to ensure the safety of people living in. You don't want people to fall out your window. That's very, very dangerous. And this is ensured by creating this safe distance of 90 centimetres. But if you are diminishing this safe distance, then this window can possibly be a danger for children or for people have walking difficulties or are not mentally stable. If you are doing such interventions where you are raising your floor, you have to make sure that either this window only opens on the upper side here, but cannot open completely wide. Or you have other mechanisms to make sure that it is not easily opened randomly by anybody. I know a lot of people who have kids, they use safety nets. You could also block the mechanism of the, of the window. You can have a window that opens only on the upper side. There are many ways in which you can reduce the possibilities of what windows, what this window can do. But this is something that you must absolutely bear in mind when you do such interventions. For our last solution, I've decided to raise this floor a little higher because kneeling is not so much for everybody. And I just wanted to explore what this option is going to bring. So I'm going to turn off this solution and go to the next solution, right? So instead of 30 centimeters away from the floor, it's 45cm. 45cm is about the height of a chair, I still have my little trapdoors, but they are a little bigger this time or a little deeper. Since these guys are a little deeper, I thought that this wardrobe could become a little shorter. And the reason for that is that I would like to change the bathroom wall with one where the light would still come through. So now I have my little piece here. The wardrobe is going up to this height where I can still allow some natural light to go through into my bathroom. And I wonder what else I can do with it. So because our floor is at a height of a chair, I thought it would be nice to actually sit on it during the day as well. And if we are to sit on it, why not have a table here at the window? I mean, this could be my daybed, but also my chair. So I'm going to, I'm going to add my table. So this is quite cool. I am, I have my wardrobe here. I have some drawers here, which I can pull. My bed which I can sleep on, but also sit on and work during the day. I have quite a lot of storage. I mean, just think of all the trapdoors here and this huge wardrobe and my drawers. I don't know what I'm going to do in the rest of the apartment was so much stuff here. I can have a lady here sitting for you to understand how this would work. Of course, everything needs detailing, like how this table is going to be fixed on the wall as well as the drawers. So at the moment we are just sketching and exploring ideas. But designing any of these compact solutions needs to be discussed with a carpenter really thoroughly. I'm just going to turn on my pillows as well. And suddenly I have a bed but also a day bed and also a storage piece... and a wardrobe and a workspace area. This is quite cool. And suddenly I have quite a bit of space here which is very free of storage and a workspace and definitely of a bed. I can easily span out here table for 12 people eating or a really big kitchen if I really like to cook. There are many, many things I can suddenly do with the rest of the space, which I couldn't imagine doing before. So in the following sections, we're going to look at how to solve the living and the kitchen area. And what kind of furniture might actually make sense? Class project. How might you combine several pieces of furniture? Used the Pinterest board in the class description, and start searching a compact piece of furniture that would be suited for your needs. Where would it fit? 12. Partitions / Part 1: I wanted to dedicate one chapter of our class to room dividers. Even though I encouraged you to take down walls. There still remains the topic of privacy. How do we manage privacy? Especially in cases where we don't live alone? If we live alone, of course, our apartment creates the privacy for us. But if there are, if there's more than one person in this apartment, we might feel the need to create some privacy, at least temporarily. Besides two people living in this apartment, we could be working from home and have clients coming in temporarily. We do want to hide our bedroom area from the view, at least temporarily. We don't want to have a wall slapped from left to right, but we still want to mask our bedroom area at least for a couple of hours. So how might we do that? I'm just going to show you some examples. Try to understand the essence of them, and then look for products that match your budget and expectations. The first thing I'm going to talk about is curtains. This is probably the cheapest and easiest way to create a bit of privacy at home. Often you can just install a rod like you do at the window and pull curtains on it. And very simply you've created some degree of privacy. And the nice part about curtains is that especially if they are semi-transparent, they still allow for light to come in. They're very flexible. You can push them in the middle or on the side. You can have them from one side to the other and they can create a really nice effecting in the room as well as temporarily mask one space from the other. Some people like them really semi-transparent and so they are a unifying element with perhaps the curtains at the window. In other cases, people also want some degree of acoustical privacy. And in that case, you might consider sound absorbing drapery, which is typically used in theatres or opera. It's a very thick material and very porous. It's probably more expensive than a normal drapery and also the cleaning is not something that you can do independently. Probably they have to be dry-cleaned. But, other than that, if you can have some sound privacy as well, you can talk in a room and not be heard in the other or not be heard quite as loudly as you would if it didn't have anything. I encourage you to use curtains if you want to create a more fluid and more flexible kind of privacy. But what I like about curtains is also is that if you don't pull them all the way, they allow for local privacy. And then you can still... your gaze can still go through these areas here and you can still see the wall in the back. And in your mind, you still have the impression of living in a, in a big space. While if you had a wall from left to right, then your sense of space would be limited only by this room that ends in this wall. And of course, you'd feel trapped in a much smaller space. I'm going to turn off the curtains. Also room dividers... some of them can be hanged from the ceiling. I really like this room divider. It is probably more suited for lounges and restaurants. But I really like big patterns in small spaces. They can really counteract that sense of living in a shoebox with the feeling of exuberance. I like big patterns because they can really give that joyful, expensive even kind of look, right? If you feel like you live in a, in an expensive hotel room rather than in a tiny shoebox. And often paying a little bit more for a beautiful wallpaper or room divider. It's worth it only for the feeling that it gives you for the, for the impression of living in a really nice, and well-designed space. What I like about this room divider is also that you can you can change the elements direction so you can allow for light to go through. It can be fully opaque, but you can also then occasionally rotate some of these pieces and allow for light to go through. And it comes in all kinds of colours. So you can create different kinds of colour patterns. And it can have a different effect every day if you want to. And at the same time still allows for, for your gaze to go through. It's quite, it's quite nice. It has a very joyful kind of effect. Another room divider that I like is this one called "tecton". It's also a Dutch company. What I like about it, it's how simple it is made. It's actually planks of wood glued together in a really nice pattern. And it creates this beautiful effect. And this impression of, of privacy. It feels again like a luxurious place rather than a tiny shoe box. Another idea that I thought about is to use a projector Canvas as a room divider. So you can use it actually on both sides and if you wanted to watch movies you could watch them from bed or from your living room I think that's also quite nice because it acts as an object with double function on one side you can have your evening cinema moment and at the same time it also acts as a privacy element another tipe of partition is furniture we've touched on this topic a couple of times but I want to go through it once again for you to understand what's possible and how this might actually look like the first partition type I am going to show you is this kind of table mixed with a shelf you can easily put this at the end of your bed and you will see some version of this in high end hotels it acts as an element that shows that the bedroom ends here and the living lounge area / workspace starts here. so it's really nice that you can on one side work and on the other have a kind of privacy once you fill in all the shelves. I really like this idea, I've seen this in a couple of hotels and I think, it's quite nice because it fills in a workspace in the living lounge area. in the case of our apartment, I would I would probably not install it here because as you remember, it's not quite aligned with my bathroom wall. that's because my bed is 2,07m and my structure here is about 30 centimeters it's a bit more than 2,30m, the length of my bathroom wall. But that's not a problem, I would probably... I would probably adapt the structure, or I would make a new type of shelf, I would definitely find a new way to create a piece of furniture here or, I would choose something else other than a piece of furniture like my curtains or other types of partitions that would still keep my alignment here but for the sake of the exercise I am just going to go through a couple of other furniture partitions, just for you to see what is possible and perhaps in the case of your apartment, this actually works. Another possibility is to use a straight up free standing shelf and that's quite nice you can have elements where you can see through in the bedroom so my sense of space is not limited by this divider alone but I still feel like I live in a generous and large space but at the same time, it creates privacy for my bedroom. Of course, free-standing shelves come in all shapes and sizes, so I am just going to show you another one which is...which has...where the shelves have a bigger division it creates a kind of pattern in my living room and at the same time, it is also a piece of storage I like that I can look through and see bits and pieces of my bedroom but I can still have some privacy which is really really nice. So these are a couple of ideas that I have for furniture room dividers and I hope some of them would actually inspire you for your own home. 13. Partitions / Part 2: What if we want to have a look at the beds that we created in our class about compactness. And not so much a situation with a bed here in the middle. Well, we have at least two options. For example, that had already a divider built in. So we had the bed and our divider in one piece. And then we had the other version, which again had a divider and the bed in one piece. They were built together. But what about the other beds, can we create some room dividers for them? Let's take this version of our bed, which we created first. How might we make more privacy for this niche? We might use our "tecton" divider to put on top of our bed so we can preserve this this line here. As it happens, this protection wall is actually made of wood, and it's quite...I mean if we calculate all these pieces of wood here, it can be quite heavy. So it's possible that our bed structure here might not be enough to hold together so much weight. So we will probably have to reinforce the bed structure with a much thicker beam. And if that's the case, then we're probably not going to be able to use our drawers here. So this version is probably not very good. If I still want to use this divider. I'll either have to put it in front of my bed or I'll have to use a divider that is lighter or hangs from the ceiling and does not place its weight on my bed. So I might in fact turn this off and use this separation wall, which is much, much nicer because it hangs from the ceiling and stops right on top of my bed and it puts no weight on my bed. And therefore, I can still use my drawers on this side. But if I still like the other one, how else might I design this area here? Another option is to put it in front, right? So if I put it in front, I will not be able to use my my drawers. But I could make the bed a little shorter instead of ending the bed right at this line, I could design the bed to build shorter and have a little bit of space for my divider. Now when I put my diviner stops exactly at the line of my bathroom, and the bed ends here. But because I won't be able to access my drawers here, I can redesign my bed so I can access the drawers on the surface here. And that shouldn't be too bad. So now that I have these three elements together, it might read beside each of them according to what effect I want to achieve. So in this case, I might actually leave my bedroom wall normally like this. Or I might go for more glass on this side. So I have one surface that is the divider here, and one surface that is my glass here. I will only recommend the solution though, for a person who lives alone. It's not ideal if more people share this apartment, but if I'm alone in this place, it shouldn't bother me so much that I have a glass area here. Not transparent, It can be milk-glass, but it should be, it should be no problem. There's a third solution for this kind of division wall, and that is to pull it in front of my bathroom wall. So if I turn on my bathroom wall, then my division wall comes in front, right? So now I still can use the drawers on this side from my bed. I still need to have this surface here to access my storage area, but then I can push the bed back to the end of the bathroom wall so it is 2,30 again. But I'd like to carry my separation wall all the way to the back. So it's both a cladding and division wall. And therefore I have a more uniform surface on this, on this area here. And it has a really luxurious and beautiful effect in a small place. And I might want to keep this. So you see, adding a division wall is never easy. You always have to think about how it relates to the other elements. Does it still offer access to my bed as before or do I have to change the design of the bed? And how does it look in relationship to the other wall? Is it behind? Is it in front? Does it stop at this line? How are these things connecting to each other? And these things will actually make or break a really nice design. When the glass stops at the edge of the bed and the bed stops at the edge of my separation wall, you know that somebody has actually thought through all the details. What about this design? A few like, It's kind of naked, it needs a bit of privacy in this area. I'm just going to turn on my chair as well so we can perceive the space a little better. So I might go for my...for this version here. And now, because I know this is quite heavy, I might have to factor into the design of my custom made furniture piece here, that this area here will have to be structurally reinforced for my room divider. And I'm kind of liking this... I am wondering if I could perhaps continue with my room divider here as well. So now I have a kind of... my own little nest here. I can sleep and I don't have to look into my bedroom from my living room. And I think that's quite nice. And now if I change my bathroom wall, maybe with a, with a glass partition here, I think that would be quite nice because on one side, I would have the light going through my bathroom wall in creating some interesting shadow play. At the same time, I think it would be interesting if I were in the bathroom as well, having the light coming through this really nice pattern here. Also, it's nice to look at when you, when you're sitting in the chair. So I'm, I'm really enjoying how this turned out. Of course, if I didn't want to, for my room divider to weigh heavily on the bed structure here I might turn it off and go back to "Bloomming" and say, wait a minute, I could hang this piece here from the ceiling. and of course, it has its own little beautiful pattern. It creates a certain kind of effect in my bedroom. It's also probably cheaper because it's a smaller surface than the other ones. And voila, I have my own room divider. I don't have to look into my bed here and it creates a really nice effect towards the living room area. So that's how I would go about creating more privacy for my bedroom if I were to use this custom made piece of furniture. If we're looking at this design, I have also created my custom piece of furniture all the way to the edge of the bathroom wall. And when I designed it, I didn't think about any kind of privacy problems. Usually I gather this information before I start designing. But sometimes there are things that appear while I design or while I discuss a sketch or a rough design with the client. So assuming that this was a chosen design, we might now actually discuss that there is an issue with privacy and perhaps creating some intimacy on occasion. And this will definitely require a little bit more attention to detail. But for my rough sketch right now, I might have to look at my edge here and just move it five centimeters to the left, or even ten, right? So now I have enough space to maybe fix a curtain rod and therefore a curtain. And now I can choose if I want to make the curtain all the way to my furniture edge here or all the way to the bottom to decide if I still want to have the access to my drawers here or not. So this would be, this is how it looks like with the curtain. And my furniture element is behind the curtain version is definitely something that I would definitely appreciate and it feels light and easy to, to implement. So probably for this design, I will go for light curtain. Class project. Where would you install your partitions? Which type will you pick? Use the Pinterest board to start looking for something that fits your space. 14. Storage: So our third principle is about the storage location and ideally to push it towards the extremities of our apartment. Now, first and foremost, you want to look towards the entryway area and use that space as much as you can, because you are not really spending time in the entryway here. You're always just passing through. So having a little bit less space than normal, it might not bother you so much. So a check if you have enough space for a wardrobe in the entryway area. Typically, wardrobes are 60 centimetres wide. And in front of them, you will need at least 1m-1,20m. And this really depends on how the doors of this wardrobe actually open. If they open towards your space here you need, you need about 1m-1,2m. If you have sliding doors, this might not be an issue. You can even have 80 centimetres in your entryway area. I would not recommend less than that because it might go against fire escape regulations. So make sure you leave a comfortable one meter in your entryway and then add a wardrobe. If whoever lives here, decides that this probably isn't enough storage space and there's more storage space needed, of course, we can use another storage area like we did originally, which is this wardrobe. Now, if you see something here is... I'm always using entire surfaces. And this is because it makes the space a lot more clear and compact. It's easier to have wardrobes that cover entire surfaces than having kind of broken pieces of different size storage spaces. So if you can try to make things as compact looking as you can, just use an entire surface. If you are going to put a wardrobe on a surface area, use the maximum because then you will probably have all your things in these two wardrobes here and then the rest of your apartment is free to use with a lot more flexible furniture. But let's say I still want to have some natural light coming into my bathroom. And I do not want to use the wardrobe on this surface. I would like to use it on this wall where my bed is actually located. So I'm looking for having a storage space like this. And I'd like to have...I still want to have some glass going through my bathroom. Well, there are, of course, beds that you can flip. I don't know if you know about the systems where the beds can be opened and closed. And then you can close the bed and have this kind of free space to use during the day. This is also nice because it's compact and you push your bed back. And now you can use this space for various things like playing with children. And if you have kids during the day or more family, you can definitely expand other things in this area, a table, some chairs, and perhaps some, some soft seating that you can spread around. And just have more flexibility in what you can do with that space during the day. Another rule that you can use for storage is the one in the living room. So this is what we originally had as a volume. And if I were to detail this, of course, this would mean that I will have more storage capacity here on the lower area. This would be part of my kitchen and this would be more shelf kind of area. And you see, even with these relatively compact in big storage elements, I still have quite a bit of free space to play here in my area. You might also decide to say, no, no, I actually need even more storage space. Than I might want to create an element that is a little bit, has a little bit of playfulness in it with open and closed shelves. That would still be part of my... part of it will be part of my kitchen and part of it for my living room. I would have opened and closed spaces and would create a kind of beautiful pattern. And it would simply be a little bit more interesting than if... then what I had before. So it's just about using the entire surface. I might not need...if I have this living room here it's possible that my bedroom here is is too much as an element. It's possible that my entire storage might just fit between these two. And this is probably too much. But I want you guys to see what is possible, right? And what you can do. Usually when there are small apartments, really think about how much you actually need in terms of storage. But if you do need a lot, then try to focus on these principles. Try to push it towards the entry way, have an entire surface, and push it towards the extremities of the windows... left and right here. In order to create an entire element of storage space. So think about how you can push the storage towards the entry way and think about how the doors of your wardrobes will open, push it towards the extremities of your wall, so in this case, the bedroom and a living room walls and try to use the entire surface if you can, that way it might spare you another storage space somewhere else. Class project. How could your furniture be more compact? Could you group it together on one surface? Could you add more storage in the corridors thus freeing the living spaces? 15. Flexibility: The last principle I'm going to talk about is "Fexibility". The reason for that is because I believe that small spaces can really benefit from flexible furniture. And what do I mean by flexible furniture? I mean furniture that can either be pushed around easily or can change shape in some form to suit different kinds of settings. Both a bedroom and a living room, or a workspace and a living room, or kitchen and living room. It's really useful when a piece of furniture in a small apartment has more than one function. That means that the same amount of square meters can support different kinds of setups. So I've designed this apartment for this class just to give you a short tour, we have the entryway here with a small cupboard for shoes, the kitchen with refrigerator, and some storage that continues in my living room. Where I also have my workspace and a TV that acts also as a computer. Here I have my living room, and lastly, I have my bedroom. I've placed here a couple of pieces of flexible furniture, and I'm going to show each of them to you. The first one is my couch here, which if you can see, is made from different modules. Each of these modules is a square piece of mattress, which is soft and easy to push around and also easy to stack together. So if I had friends over, I can easily stack them on top of each other and push them in a corner or make more seating possibilities for my guests. The same goes for these two here. I also have my coffee tables which are very light and easy to push around. And I have my office chair, which is equally easy to move around should I need to. Then I have my table here, which typically acts as my desk, but I can also have it turn around and act as a dinner table if I wanted to. Then I have my curtain here, which can be open if I'm home by myself or I live with my partner. But if I had friends over, or guests over and I wanted for this area here not to be visible. I could turn this off and push my curtain in the middle and not have my bedroom be visible. What I also could do is push this bet to the upper side. This is a bed made by Resource Furniture, which has the special quality that you can lift it up and have it one with the, with this wardrobe. Just gonna show you how it looks like. So this is how my bet would be pushed back. So suddenly I have a lot of space to work with here. I have also designed this wardrobe here, all around my bed. The bed is standard, but it often makes sense to design custom made furniture to support the standard furniture that you buy. That way I can use the entire wall here for storage and have a very flexible area. This is actually what I want to show you. I have static furniture on the sides of my apartment, but in the middle here, I can do a lot of things. I can push my couch around, I can push my chairs around. I can pull them, and push and pull the curtain. I have a lot of space here that I can manipulate in many different ways depending on what settings I have to adapt to. But if I had like a massive couch here in the middle or a massive wardrobe, then the flexibility would be much, much lower. So this kind of setup is very useful if you have big fluctuations in the number of people in this apartment. So if you have two people, but you have very frequent family visits or you really like to entertain. So then your apartment needs to quickly change from what it can do during the day to what it can do during the night. And having more flexible furniture can definitely support that. So I'm just going to show you what you can do in this condition. Of course, you can always turn the pieces of the couch in such a way that it can accommodate people. Or you can move pieces of furniture around to create a bit more space in the living and in kitchen area. And of course, you can always allow kids to play in this area. What if I move the couch all the way to the back here and spread out all the small squared mattresses, this is what it could look like. So I could have here very soft area where grownups are kids could sit and lie around and talk. And I can use my two coffee tables to have drinks spread out. And then I can also turn my table here to make it into a party table like this, right? So I can also turn my, my chair here around. And so now I have a full-blown, party set up for people coming over and guests. And I think the quality of this is that I basically doubled my living room area by simply lifting my bed up here and closing all my bedroom trinkets behind doors and in this wall-like wardrobe. So now I have more space for, for my guests. You don't have to use all these examples in your home, but just a couple of pieces of flexible furniture can really change what your home can do. This is not a big apartment, but planned skillfully enough in advance. It can really offer you a number of settings and of opportunities that you would otherwise not have in a space as small as this. And if you've planned this ahead, then perhaps you don't have to move in a bigger place so early because you won't feel the pressure to move in a bigger place so soon and all the money that you might spend for a bigger rent will go into your pocket. Because hey, you thought about this in advance or you thought about a couple of pieces of furniture that can really make a difference in your life and in the quality of your living. So flexibility is definitely the point that you want to think of. Class project. What flexible pieces of furniture could you use? Use the Pinterest board in the class description to find something that could work for you. Where would you place it? 16. Optical Illusions / Part 1: If you, if you can take something away from this class, is that it doesn't really matter how small a place is, but how small place feels. So while we might want to make a space bigger by tearing down some walls, we can make it small again, by putting up storage pieces. If you have one, might be OK, but if you have two already, this space starts to feel very, very small. I have here a storage piece of 60 centimeters wide and here 40 centimeters. So I've already taken one meter from the length of this apartment. And maybe you have this much storage, and if you do, I would really encourage you to really think about what you actually need and don't need and getting rid of some stuff. But if you really do need all those things, how might we store things in a way that it doesn't make us feel like we live in a shoebox. And one way to do that is to use some optical illusions. And what I mean by that is, us as humans, we're always... when we're standing, we're always looking ahead and we're kind of approximating the distance in front of us. So whatever is in front of our eyes is going to make the space in front of us look smaller. But if it's above our eyes, or below our eyes, It's still going to leave this the impression of a big space. So for small spaces it's a little bit clever not to use the typical storage pieces that big apartments or normal sized artments use, but to actually make use of the floor or the ceiling area. If we talk about ceiling storage, where might this go? I'm just going to turn off my two wardrobes here. Where would you use the ceiling to store things? You have to use certain areas of your ceiling strategically. You can't use the one in your bedroom and you can't use the one in the living room. So what else is left? Well, you can definitely use the one in the corridor area. And because we have here already a wall in place, we can definitely use this area here,right? To mark my, my ceiling. Now there are all kinds of systems for ceiling and as I am in the sketch mode I've barely, barely started my project. I'm only sketching that, and I will have to lower the ceiling in this area. But I'll have to look at this in more detail later on. You can't solve the big picture and the details at the same time. Right now I'm just showing you where you might store things. So definitely at the entry way, in front of the bathroom, on corridors, anywhere where you do not spend that much time. So you can leave it as low as you can. For example, here I have 2,20m height, floor height.It is just 10 centimetres above a normal door, because our apartment has 2,80m floor height, this is probably 60 centimetres all in all righ? Where else might I be able to store things? I can definitely store things above my kitchen. Right? So I can definitely mark this area here is kinda of a service zone and here the kind of living area. Now, if I want to have a kitchen island additionally to my kitchen here, and place this location here. It's fine if my ceiling stops here. But I can also make my ceiling a little longer. So now I can have more storage space underneath here. Probably not entirely, but I can definitely use more surface to store things. And now I've made my service area a little wider. I can also use this area here to add the wardrobe. So now my wardrobe here is aligned with my kitchen island. And that's quite nice and my, my ceiling here stops here. And it doesn't really bother me, really, Because the living room area is left alone and it feels just as longest before. So having a lower ceiling here doesn't quite bother me that much and I would encourage you to use it sparingly. But if you have a lot of stuff I just want to show you where you can add more things that perhaps you don't even have to use this part. So you can also use just...you can also use ...make the ceiling a lower strategically, so only at the entryway and only above this kitchen island living the kitchen installed as before. Where else might you put? Now, I would advise you not to add more of this, but between adding more storage on the walls or in the ceiling, I would definitely try to show you where else it might go. So wherever you do not spend any time. And as we created here, a kind of corridor that goes left to our bedroom and right to our living room I might be able to add another piece here. So I might... I'm adding here another lowered ceiling where I can store things, which also marks kind of the difference between my bedroom and my living room. However, I wouldn't leave it as low as these guys here. This guy is 60 centimeters and this one is about 40. I still want to create the space height. But in case there is a need for more storage, I could also recommend it here. Now, these kind of details are the stuff that keep architects up at night... awake. I'm not gonna go into them. But I'm just trying to give you more and more examples of what you can do with your apartment and where can things go, and before you add one more wardrobe to your tiny bedroom, I would encourage you to use your ceiling to store things. Always look at how your suspended ceiling interacts with your furniture. So in this case, it actually completes it while my wardrobe only goes up to this height. I have a suspended ceiling site that allows for more storage above it. But if we were to turn off the wardrobe and add perhaps another bed, it suddenly doesn't quite make sense anymore, right? So we always have to look at what's underneath my suspended ceiling and how does it actually make sense? Now the second way to store things in your small apartment and still give the impression that it's quite a big apartment is to store them in the area of your floor. In my class about compactness, I showed you how you can combine a bed with a workspace and the storage area and perhaps even a guest bed,right? And that's great for the fact that you can combine many functions under the same amount of space. But a second reason why this is great is because it still, it keeps the walls free. And therefore the impression that the apartment is as big as it is and not smaller. Is there. So even if I turn on the middle, ceiling, my view towards this wall is not obstructed. So when I'm looking into the distance, I can still see this wall and the apartment still feels quite large. But if I were to turn on the... the other wardrobe, then it would feel smaller. So it's always good to store things. either in the ceiling area or in the floor area. So for example, with this one I get the store all my things in the ceiling, in the wardrobe, in the floor, and it's a lot of storage but it still... gives you the impression that the apartment is quite large. If you live in a small apartment, you have to use your space a little bit more conscious than somebody who lives in a bigger apartment. Because you want to, not only store your things, but also make your space feel as large as, as it can be. And if you start building all your walls, it will start to feel smaller again. So you have to use tricks, optical tricks and go to places where people with normal, or average apartments don't go to, which is floor area and ceiling area to make your space feel as large as you can make it feel. Class project. Where could you install a ceiling storage? Has the area on your plan. 17. Optical Illusions / Part 2: Besides storing your things in such a way that your place doesn't look any smaller than it actually is, there's also a trick that you can use to make your place look a little bigger than it actually is. And the way to do that is to use mirrors. I'm just gonna show you a couple of examples of where I would use mirrors in this apartment and I'll tell you a little bit about the thinking behind it so you would know where you can place your mirrors in your apartment. So the first thing I do when I enter into a space is my eyes are looking around and my mind is kinda of estimating the distances around me. And it's always useful if you want to make your space look a little bigger to use mirrors, right where my gaze is going. And often, it's useful to use these mirrors an symmetry axis or midpoints. So if I were to use, if I were to look at my apartment here, It could be useful to have a mirror right at the end of the midpoint axe of this entryway. So if I were to pull an axe here, then it would be useful to have a mirror at the end of this axe but unfortunately, my axe is not quite the midpoint between these two. And it wouldn't feel natural if I put a mirror right here. But it would feel natural if I were to put a mirror between these two elements. So if I were to make an axe at the midpoint here, I could technically insert a mirror, So I'm going into my apartment here, and the first thing I see is this mirror. And it fools me a little in estimating how far my apartment actually is. If I were to put one in my bedroom, for example, a good place for this mirror, at least in this apartment that has no door in the bedroom would be the symmetry line of this apartment. So I can easily turn on the second mirror. And this of course, would only work if I had another piece of furniture here in the middle. You have to place mirrors strategically in places where people would stop and look around. And this will definitely be in the case of my bedroom hero that has no door, having a symmetry line would definitely make the apartment look much more interesting. And it would work really well if the furniture would support this imagery as well. So if I were to use my original bed and sidetables, then this would definitely make a lot of sense. If I were on the other hand to say, you know what, that's not the bed I want to have in this apartment, I want to have this bed and this mattress. Then this doesn't quite make sense anymore. The gravity centre is going towards this bed here. I feel like the mirror might be better placed on this side, or that this wall would work on a different composition with perhaps more art or different kind of arrangement. And I don't want to talk about style yet, I'm just trying to explain how you can fool the brain into thinking that the space is a little bigger. But I do want to give you the idea that the best place for mirrors in order to fool the brain is at the end of an axe, where people are most likely to look into your room. But you should definitely position this mirror in relationship to the rest of the furniture. So if your furniture is asymmetrically placed in the bedroom, then perhaps this location is not ideal. So I'm just going to turn off this mirror. I feel like if I were to look around, I feel like a mirror on this wall, would be better placed. But because my bed is asymmetrical, the symmetry line... I feel like would work better with my, with my space, would be actually the symmetry line of the bed, and not the entire construction. So this is what it looks like. And since we are speaking about placing mirrors into your apartment, I would encourage you to also align these mirrors with other elements in your, in your homes. First of all, it would be great if it was exactly at eyesight. So the centre of the mirror should be somewhere at the height of 1,60m-1,70m, probably 1,60m. Depends on how big the mirror is at 1,50m-1,60m probably there. So whenever a person would stroll around, they would look straight into this mirror. And then the second idea is to just align this mirror with other elements. So if I have this element here, I would not want my mirror to go any further. Or if I had another piece of art hanging here, I will try to make these two elements be located on the same height. So in this case, I have might pull and axe here. And then I pull an axe here. And I'm definitely going to raise the height of this mirror, although please don't take it as a recommendation to use two mirrors in a bedroom. But if this was a mirror and this was a piece of art, then it would definitely make a lot more sense to, to place them at an equal height. It just creates a lot more order in this space and it's easier to perceive by the viewer. So these are a couple of tips that I want to impart with you. I'm not going to talk about materials or style or how the style of the mirror should be. Probably my last tip that I would encourage you to use when using mirrors, is to never use very large mirrors, large mirrors go very well with large spaces. But if you have a small space, a large mirror can look rather kitsch. So use mirrors and use them strategically in locations where people are most likely to look when they enter into a space but don't go overboard with the size. I hope these are a couple of tips that you can use in your apartment. Do let me know in the comments how you have used these ideas. Class project. Mark on your plan where would you install mirrors such that your space would look bigger? 18. 10 Apartments: Regarding the design of the kitchen in the living room, I didn't feel like there were many general guidelines I could talk about at this phase, which is sketching that many people can benefit from. Kitchens specifically are very customizable pieces of furniture and their real value lies into details and how well they respond to the needs of the people living in and the constraints of the space. Still, I wanted you guys to see how differently this apartment looks with various types of kitchens and living rooms. So I can inspire you to look at your space a little differently. So here are ten ways in which this apartment can be designed. 19. Final Thoughts.: Thank you for watching the class until the end. I hope you learned a few new things and are inspired to design your small apartment. If you are serious about sketching on your floor plan, I also recommend using the book "Neufert". It is packed with information about standard dimensions in the entire world of to build space, but specifically for homes, you will learn that only how big certain pieces of furniture are, but how far apart they should be located in relationship to each other. Do use the Pinterest boards in the class description. You'll find a lot of the things I talked about in the class in there. And it could also be a platform for you to start digging deeper into finding solutions that are better fit for you. I enjoyed teaching this class a lot and I can't wait to see what you have taken away from it in the class project. I'm here to help you grow and improve. So if you have any questions do let me know in the comments. 20. 10 Final final thoughts : Congratulations, you have made it to the end of the class. I hope you learned some new things and already feeling inspired to apply them, enjoyed teaching this class a lot. And I can't wait to see what you have taken away from it. So I invite you to go to the project and Resources section and share your class project with me and other students of the class. I will make sure to give you feedback and help you on your way to comment and encourage other students on their class project will help you make some new connections on the platform. Please use the discussion section to let me know your thoughts and questions about the class. I'd love to help you clarify any concepts you do not understand. And it also helps me improve my classes so you can learn better. If you enjoyed this class, I would appreciate a review it, tell skill share that you liked my class and it encourages other people to discover my work. Hit the Follow button if you want to see more classes like this one, or follow me on social media for weekly nuggets of architecture and design wisdom or just funny thoughts.