Transcripts
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? Your bedroom and living area, the cooking area with friends
and entertainment area, children's playgrounds
and so many more things. Finally, how do I use all these different pressing
spatial problems in a way that leaves my apartment
looking more beautiful? In this class, I'll
be teaching you 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 be
teaching you is by going through the
design process over 33 m² or 361 square
feet apartment. You'll be watching
over my shoulder and sometimes into my
head how I sketch in 3D model different
types of solution for this space and how I tackle
those spatial problems. My aim for this
class is to help you solve real pressing
spatial problems. I'll be teaching you not
so much what furniture to buy and 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. 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. It's a topic very
important to me. Living in spaces that feel
small makes us feel small. Small spaces are also often
enough hard to furnish. They're not just small, but frequently enough,
also quite ugly. 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
to 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 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 their limitations that 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's moving in like an elderly parent? What they want more or less of. What do they currently
perceived 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're about
the design or inhabit, and 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 we'll 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
can they 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 shatters 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 work
that needs 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 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 252, 280 meters high. If you live in a
mid-century building, let's say 19th 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 be taken into
account in your design. Now you have a set of needs and wants and desires from
the people living in. They need to be married with the constraints and
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 the class project, I'd like you guys to ask yourself two questions
in the class. How would you like to
live in your space? Find the 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: 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, and the amount of effort
that they will need; the amount of financial effort, time effort, to coordination
effort, and so on. What I will recommend
you to do is to make an impact effort graph. I didn't come up with this, I've also learned 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 which problems are more
pressing than others. Now 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 the symbol
x and y-axis. Now on the x-axis is the impact, and then the y-axis
is the effort. 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? Where you want to start with your design is with
the 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. Then plan for the high
impact high effort. Now they can decide which design decisions
are going to make the biggest impact, it will have 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
in a wardrobe there, will this impact the amount of furniture that you
have in your bedroom? Perhaps you can have a
smaller workshop there. If I take down a wall
between the living room and the bedroom to affect not only
how the living room looks, but also how to
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 is it going to relate it with 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 a laboratory in
vitro situation. Whenever you decide
something in the kitchen, this is going to impact
the living room, and whatever you changing
the living room is going to impact the
bedroom, the bathroom. 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 and the
new conditions. Will your design decisions
solve all 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 the physical space, you really need to know
what this case is going to look like before you take the
decision to start building. It's 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. What you want to do is plan and design these things
in another medium. But architects are
typically doing is they use catching or they
use 3D modeling, something that I'm
going to show you later on in this class, or use physical models. Personally, I'm not a
physical model person. I'm better at gluing
my fingers together, than I have building
physical models, but with 3D modeling
I'm quite good and I'm going to 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
modeling 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 box that you have to really show you how
something would look like in a physical space. Let's say you wanted to buy the nightstand that is of
certain dimensions or you might want to use a
cardboard box and cut it in those dimensions and place it where you want
it to be placed. Therefore, you would have a physical representation of
what the 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 is a
lot lower than the bed, or you might see that it
has a different color than the other pieces of
furniture and that might not be something that
you really like. There are many things
that you will start discovering what you said
pops in your environment. Class project. Put all
the design decisions from 0.3 in the previous segment
on an impact effort graph. Make a list starting
with the decisions in the high impact, low
effort category. What will 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 own, which you received
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 US, the last three countries in
the world who still use it. A floor 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. 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 centimeters in real life are represented by one centimeter
on my paper space. As 100 centimeter
make one meter, one meter in real life is
one centimeter on my paper. You can also check this with your ruler by placing it
on top of your scale. If one centimeter on your ruler is one
unit on your scale, then 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 the scale of 1:200, which means that two
meters in real life are represented by one
centimeter on your paper. For the students of the class who use the imperial system, here are the closest
corresponding scales. Equivalent of 1:100 scale in the imperial system is
the eighth inch scale, which is actually 1=833. For the 1:200, we have the 16th-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 the living
room are 3.2 meters wide, which is 10.49 feet. I'm also looking at the
distance between the window and the adjacent walls
to see if I can typically fit any
wardrobes in the corners. The wardrobe is about 60
centimeters wide which is 1.92 feet and I see that the bedroom has
about 80 centimeters 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 492 feet wide which tells me that I can't really
add a bath tab there, but it has room for
a general shower. What else am I noticing? I 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 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 in ventilation shafts. They usually tell me
where the bathroom and the kitchen sink and
other utilities should be located because the further the utilities are from
these shafts and pipes, the more work 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 an 18th century big house? This is very important because houses that are
more than a century old offer all 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. Each apartment needs to be
looked at individually. But for the sake
of our exercise, the middle walls, the 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. Re-scale the floor plan
so you can sketch on it. For example, make a
copy two times bigger. Understand the measurement. 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 and what the opportunities, what the constraints
of the floor plan are. Sketching is a very important
part of the design process. I feel 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 to 50 flow time, but I was afraid that
you guys watching this class might not be able to see everything
that I'm doing. I printed the floor plan a
little bigger than that. One to 25, 1 to 25 typically means 25 cm in real life means 1 cm
on your paper space. It's quite big for a sketch, but for this class, it will do. You can print it at whatever size you feel would be easy for
you to sketch on. One to 50, 1 to 20, 1 to 25 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 ideas
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 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 want to make sure that my
sketch paper isn't moving. It's quite slippery, and you can easily move from the location you
initially placed it on. My favorite pens to work
with are mechanical pens. I have this from Koh-I-Noor, which is like check
checked brand. I absolutely love them. They have been doing the exact same pen
for 10, 20 years. The design hasn't
really changed much. They work incredibly well. I've had this one for
at least ten years. It's not that I really
enjoy keeping things, but if it's not broken,
why throw it away? It works flawlessly. [NOISE] You can use
different types of lead. You can change the
lead in the middle and they come in different
thicknesses and also in different softness, I guess 5b, for example, can be very soft, while 2b or 3b can
be a little harder. Figure out what kind of lead 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. The lines can be a
little darker than lead, which I actually like. For this sketch, I
will use this pen. It's not very different
from Koh-I-Noor, the only real difference is that the weight is actually placed towards
the tip of the pencil. I really like how it
sits in your hand. I push the lead out a
little bit and it just has this elongated silhouette which fits really well with
my long fingers. I also use 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 of 1 to 25, then I know that 4 cm
on my ruler meter, on my floor plan. I know that a couch
maybe is 90 cm, which is a little
bit less than this. For some Some, 60 cm is probably this much. It's an orientation
scale if you want, you don't want to make a
wardrobe that is this big. 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 favorite
pen. It's ketch 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 one, as we discussed before, I printed in the scale 1-25, 1-100 would have been probably
this big and I thought you probably will not see
much from what I'm drawing. 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 up this 1-50 or 1-33 but I thought 1-25 should be really easily visible from where
you are watching my sketching and probably also
much easier to understand. One to twenty five
typically means 25 centimeters in real life, one centimeter on
your floor plan. Sketching on a floor
plan can also give you a couple of
inputs about scale, couple of ideas of where
you might want to go with your floor plan but it's not very precise tool which
is why once you have a concept that you have sketched and you pretty much
feel confident about, you should put it
immediately in CD, in the program that
is much more precise. You can see if that really
fits as you imagined or not. But sketching is an architect
is a tool that fluctuate between free flow and
actual scale design. Now I'm sorry, if
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 doors so
I'm trying to get a feeling of how people are
moving into this space, I have balcony door here. Before I'm going to draw what I imagine this place could be. First of all, this place
can be arranged in 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 going to start
with what I think people normally will do in
a plan like this, just to show you what typically happens and where the
problem start to rise. For this plan, I'm assuming maybe one person or two people could
move in here. What do you need?
You need a bed. You might draw a
bed in the bedroom, this is 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 140, one meter, 40 centimeters. This would be 125 and
this would be 150 so I'm assuming if this is
the middle of the room, I'm assuming
something like this, it's not super precise
but I'm assuming a bed like this could be here. You need about two meter
10 so something like this. One meter, 51 meter,
40 meters there. This could be my bed. I'm also thinking, well, I might need some
storage 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's going
to be somewhere around here. A wardrobe is about
60 centimeter 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 back. This is my sketch and this is my wardrobe maybe it has three, because this is like 220, the standard module is
about 60 centimeters, so 180 length, it can be somewhere, well it can be a little longer, it can be non-standard. I also have to think about
how am I going to open this 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 TV unit is about the size
of a wardrobe in width so also about 60 centimeters wide. Just going to assume it's
going to be up to here maybe and the couch is typically 90 centimeters wide so maybe
a little bit like this. It doesn't really matter
how long you make it couches come in all
lengths and sizes, mine is about two meter, 25 and maybe it stops here. That's my TV right there. I think kitchens are
typically installed here, either their standard or
that's where most people put them and it's not
about location, I think it's fine. Have my kitchen modules here. Look at the exact dimensions
of the modules later, typically a kitchen
module is 60 by 60 so this would be like 240. I think our rooms are 320 so maybe even five
modules might fit in there. [NOISE] This is just
a little sketch, we'll 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. I'm always thinking of how the human moves
into this space. I'm assuming there
will be some kind of a table here either for the kitchen or for just to eat. It's a little small it
be a long one, whatever. That's probably what
a normal person or a normal human being moving in this is going
to think that they need. 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? 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, or you spend more
time on things that you didn't think you need and others that you thought
you might need, don't spend so much time on. For example, you've
installed here a TV unit, and you might think, 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 three-quarters of my living room because I
was not really at home. I was traveling a lot, but also I spend my
evenings away from home. The first part of the design, the analysis of the people and the 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 what some furniture company
tells you you should have. This is the standard, what people get when they first furnish
their floor plan, and the problems start
to arise when you think, but what if I want
to work from home, where would I install a table? I only have one meter here, so the smallest table
is 60 centimeters wide. There is no place here.
There is no place here. There is 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 skis 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, 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. For a 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. 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, the shower, and a small sink. This is our bed with
the storage wardrobe, our kitchen is here, we have a couch, and also a TV unit. Here we have our balcony exit, and this is our balcony
from the outside. I've made for you
guys some views from inside the apartment and you can see how small it is. We start with the living room. 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. If I want to have
a look at the TV, this is my TV, can look around. You can see out the balcony. Then we can look from the entryway towards
our leaving room. The height of 160 centimeters, this is how our living room looks like, it's not very big. This is our kitchen. Now let's have a look
towards the bedroom. Bedroom is also quite small, here on the right side
we have our storage. This is our cupboard here. Then we can have a
look at the bathroom, which is not particularly big. 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. Class project, 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 look bigger is to simply tear down the walls that do not have a
structural function. This only happens under
certain conditions. One is you own the apartment. Number 2 is you do not
live in a monument or any building that is culturally relevant
for your community. Three, 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. Number 4 is 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 neighbors, and your
neighbors' neighbors in danger. You do not want to leave any of these to chance and
you want to concern yourself with the
structural engineer or a local architect. There 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. [LAUGHTER] You want to
really consider who is living there with you and how important these
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. If you know you live in an
apartment for 5-10 years, and the sense of space really
means something to you, great, go ahead. But 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 apartment
to somebody else, you might want to consider if the way the apartment looks
and the way it suits you, is going to suit the
new tenants as well. If not, there are 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 of 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, and smaller rooms have a lot of dark corners and often
when we go in these rooms, we feel like we
live in a shoe box. 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. Therefore, when we bring
natural light into a space, we don't just contribute
to our health, but it will also contribute
to this sensation, this feeling of living in a bigger space than we
actually lived in before. If you want to
check in our sketch how the light would
disperse in our space. I just want 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 life is going
to create this surface. 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. We'd have a lot of
darkness in the back. This is absolutely dark
because it doesn't have any light and then this is how the light will
disperse in the space. But if we were to
remove one wall, 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 would 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 dark corners here. Although we might
have a darker room, in this area is going
to be a lot less. In fact, this area here is going to be flooded with light. If we can imagine
adding a piece of glass here in the bathroom, then perhaps even this area
can have a bit more light. You see removing a wall doesn't just create
a sense of space, but also floods the
apartment with more light. Now we look at our
space and there's way more light here and
therefore removing the wall doesn't just give you a
sense of a bigger space because you're suddenly looking at more space between
these two walls, but also makes you feel like you live in a
more generous space. I 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, and what a difference
it actually makes. We'll just have a short tour of the apartment as it is
now, very small rooms. 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. By removing the wall 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. Now, let's have a look
at our other options. I've created a
couple of variations for this bathroom wall for you, and we can discuss
in a little bit. I just want to
emphasize that changing the bathroom wall can 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 there going to
be a wardrobe here? Well, 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 incisions
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 from considering that this room gets a lot
of natural light, there's going to be some natural light
coming inside as well. What about this version where
this wall is about 185, 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 a problem as before. It doesn't have to be
fully transparent glass. It can be milky glass, but there'll be, of course, much more natural light coming
into the bathroom and it can look a lot more interesting. This will, of course, be discussed with the owners if this is something
that they like. Some people prefer
these 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. 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 into 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 centimeters 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
centimeters can be quite a lot. 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, identify the walls that
are not load-bearing. What would your apartment
look like without them? Which rooms could benefit
of more natural light? Only do this step if
you own the apartment.
8. Zoning: The first principle
I need to talk about is seeing where
your corridors are. This is our entryway, and if this wall were in there, then going into our apartment, I'm going to want to access
various types of rooms. I'm accessing the bathroom here, and probably the kitchen here, and the bedroom here, and the living room here. 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. Now probably somewhere
in here too, because I have to access my
living room and my kitchen. Suddenly I have this surfaces that I am working with to plan, this has to stay free
and these spaces here. We'll have to see
about this one, but this space is here, will be probably
filled with furniture, and these sides here
can be furniture too. As I said, our windows here
allow for this course, so it can fit in some
wardrobes if I want. This is my corridor here. On this corridor, ideally, I don't have any furniture
or if I do it's not very obstructive to my corridor. It doesn't have to
be this strict maybe the corridor is a
little bit like this. But just for you to understand, now that we have zones where we have a bedroom, a living room and the kitchen. These are free of
furniture types of spaces. Now, this should
actually help us figure out where certain
furniture pieces can be. 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. Maybe my bed 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 can 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. In the following classes, we are going to look
at more ways to divide these spaces without
using any walls. Let's see in 3D what I
mean about corridors. I've created here a person and we're going to let
her come into the house. Now, this is
definitely a corridor because she needs to
access the bathroom. Once she's in, she might want to leave her coat
somewhere in this space. I might want to build
some furniture piece here where she can
leave her coat. I've put here a wardrobe, but definitely this is
going to be a corridor. 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 like to have a little bit
more privacy and for that I created a freestanding shelf. Now I've separated my bedroom
area from the living area, and I also have a little bit of intimacy with this shelf here, and I can see that my corridors to get into my
bedroom right here and here. I can also put my side
tables here in my bedroom. Now I can access my
two-side tables. I have a shelf for 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 division, at least a visual division, or where my attention is
going away from the bedroom. Now, if I want to
populate my kitchen, for example I could have a
small little module here, and I could have here
a wall that unites both my kitchen and my living
room or a furniture wall, and maybe a coffee table. My kitchen has here two modules, and now I've created
this corridors where this one is the
main access where all my apartment is divided into main functions of the
bedroom and a living room, and the kitchen, then
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 easier than it would be if I would place these
things all over the place. This is what I mean by corridors and the corridors are usually
straight lines and you always have to figure out if you want to get your balcony
what is the easiest way? If you want to get your bedroom, what's the easiest way? It's always easy to notice these natural paths in your apartment so you
can build around them. Class project, identify the
zones of your apartment. What are the natural easy way to move 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. I can order all the other
objects in my floor plan. For example, I have
this wall here, and I can use the
axis that come from this place to order other
elements in my plan. These for example might
be guiding elements for my 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. I might just have enough room here for a freestanding shelf. 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 might floor plan. It's 1 meter 40 here. I might use a wider
sitting element. It's probably a
small leather couch, that has perhaps additional
sitting elements next to it. Or I can make my freestanding
shelf a little bigger. Therefore, use this one as an order element and create a bigger couch
here probably like this. This could be an all in one. You see, I'm always
looking for ways to create a little
older in my space. I might create here a bigger
wardrobe for my entryway, probably a wall, maybe
even a small kitchen here. I think I have enough space. These are all wardrobes. 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 wardrobe here, then I can create a
more fluent space in this area to do
whatever I want with. What do I need when I
speak about guidelines? I'm basically trying to
create a order in my space. If you want an architect
to have a headache, show him misaligned objects
in the space is by nice, not strike you if you're not
necessarily an architect. But this misalignments are
going to come across to use a consciously and you'll feel that something is not
right with this place. Always look at how you
can align objects in your space in order to
create a sense of order. 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's 1020
centimeter difference here. What I can do in my
moment of course, because it's still in
the sketching situation, is I can change these volumes. Just going to align
them to this corner. These are just volumes, and of course the 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 130
centimeters long, but 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 objects in space and see what makes
sense and what doesn't. The second thing that I
dislike is this misalignment between my standing shelf
and the bathroom wall. If I would bring here. You will see that my
my wardrobe is very strongly misalign and
that's because of my bed. I have 2 meter, 30 here. My bed is probably
something like 2 meter, seven or eight. Therefore, the 30 centimeters, that my wardrobe has, will start to push back
on outside this line. It's not quite aligned but, even if I would align it, it would still be
outside of this line. Now, I really get a
massive headache. If you show this
to any architects, they'll get a massive headache. What you can do is of
course you can say, "Well, maybe I don't
want to shelf, maybe I want a freestanding wall or a curtain", or
something like that. But I was just curious, what would I do if the client really wanted the
shelf like this, what I would personally do is
simply redesign the shelf. In my case, I already
redesign it so you don't have to sit next to
me while I'm modeling. But it would basically, instead of this, would be this. I will just push my shelf back and I would get
rid of the lower shelves. I wouldn't use just upper
shelves for storage. Just about the variation to
my shelf I thought about using this as a TV unit. What this middle road here does, 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. 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. 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 lot more
transparent and fluid. 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 this maybe wall. Now I also have a much more
luxurious looking bathroom. If I come back to
my living room, I would like to turn on this storage unit because maybe what I have
here is that enough, and what I have here, it's probably not enough for all the books are the
things that I want. Maybe I'm going to keep some things on the
lower area here, and I will have some
shelves in this area. Currently is just
the volume here, my library, but I can
of course, detail list. I could even say, wait, I could use this color and
align this corner here. Now I can really mark the space between my
services and my living area. 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 shelve? But I really like
the idea of having a kitchen that is very well-defined through
these corners. It's very well structured so I can understand that
the kitchen ends here. Even if I don't have any walls. 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. Now I have my college
which is also aligned to this standing shelf. Then this is also, of
course, quite nice, and now we have a real
sense of order in my space and a real sense of clarity
and easiness of this space. Things are much more easy to
understand and to navigate. Order is one of the most
important things in design. But especially for
smaller apartments, having ordering clarity can really change that
sense of hoarding and things piling on to you because there's no
much storage space for them. Class project. How will
you align your furniture? What pieces of furniture
or walls or 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. Often it combines a bed
with a piece of storage, and the 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 it is. In our case, I'm
going to talk about compactness around our bed. Not always, but in many cases, the compactness can
be achieved around the bed area and we're
going to explore variations and look at the advantages each
option has to offer. If we look at our bedroom area, we know that it's 230 by 370. How can we achieve
compactness of the bed? Let's start with the mattress. Where might we position this? So 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. I'm building my bed
around my mattress. 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 nightstand, so I've created this area
here where I can install sockets and place 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 could install a drawer here and
here, so why not? Let's add them and look at them. This is quite nice. I have now a bed and
the storage area. We've created a compact
storage piece slash bed and it looks quite nice. I could spend my evenings here, but it could also be
a day lounge 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 tools. My wall at the left side. If I turn on the front wall. Now you'll see I've created here quite an interesting niche. I have storage and
bed all-in-one. Looking at this bed, it feels like it covers
a lot of surface, but it doesn't offer quite
as much storage as I'd like. I'm thinking that perhaps
this surface here, if it were higher, I could have more
storage area as well as protection cover
or protection wall from a direct view in my
bedroom so I could hide my bed view behind a
bigger storage piece. What would this look like? If I were to turn
off my bed here, would probably have
to look like this. Just model 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 this wardrobe will
turn into a table. I'm going to turn on my bed. 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 that this piece of furniture
also offers drawers, so I have drawers here and
I even have a drawer here. In case I have a guest, I would have a spare
bed for them as well. You see I could easily
put a bed here. Now I've basically used
this 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. If use this surface
area very, very well. Just imagine what else I
can do with this piece. Suddenly, I have too
much space available. Or maybe there's
never too much space. But anyway, I freed a
lot of this area here. With a little bit of
planning you can make a very small area like
this one here work really, really hard for you. By now you might say, well, it's all good and 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. In fact, I'd really like
to have more storage because two drawers here
just aren't enough. I can tell you that doing
that is definitely possible. 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. I'm just going to
turn on my bed, so a mattress is
placed on the bed. Here I have drawers and I also have a drawer for
my guest's bed, so that still works. In order to access my bed, I have some steps and these
steps too our drawers. I even have some
trap doors 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. This will actually match
this exact line here where my storage area ends. It suddenly becomes much
more coherent element. As I said before, this doesn't
have to be transparent. It can be middle-class. But suddenly it seems to be more of a one-piece
than two pieces. I'm just going to show you how the drawers would look like? I have my guest bed drawer here. I have drawers in my staircases
and I have drawers here. Suddenly I have a
lot more storage, I have storage here, and I have storage here. I can place books and
other objects here. Now it has become quite a
complex piece of construction, but it also houses a
lot of my storage area. I've really free 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 a compact peace of furniture that
includes a bed, a piece of storage, a bit protection of
some kind, a table? Can we add the table here? I'm curious. I'm just going to
turn off this version and we're going to move
to our next option, which is this one. I have here, a bed, a piece of storage
underneath my bed. I have more storage here
that continuous from my bed. I have a table positioned
right in front of my window. That's quite nice. Taking advantage of this niche that has presented itself here, I have a table with a chair, I have storage, left and right. Then I also have a
bed. That's neat. I have to say
because on one side I'm marking my niche
here and on the other, I'm using it very well. I can work here. I have my clothes here.
I can sleep here. 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. I'm just going to also
show you the drawers. You can see how this
might look like if I were to put my clothes
in these drawers. I can also use small
ladder to access my bed. I could also design the ladder
in my construction here. In the sketch part of my design, I just decided to use
an exterior ladder, but for sure I can create
some 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, we could use this
piece of furniture, both seating area as a temporary seating area and as a support to get into my bed. I'm liking this
piece of furniture. Now I'm wondering, could I be housing more than two
people in this apartment? Could I have more
people living here? As our structure is growing
and growing in height. I think if we're
making an even higher, we might be able to add
more beds in this area. Let's have a look how
this might be possible. Just going to turn off the
version I created here, and we're going to move
to the next version, which is this one. 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. When I go in, I
don't necessarily look directly into the
rest of the apartment. I get to hang my
coat somewhere here. Then I get to see and explore
the rest of the apartment. I want to create a bigger
niche here in to me to 30 which I had in
my bathroom here, is just not quite enough. I'm trying to create a little bit more
space for for my beds. I'm just going to turn them on. 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 nightstand area that
I need for every bed. I can even tell you
exactly how much they are. They are 240, I would also want to turn
on the small ladder. Now I have two beds, one on top of the
other things I can typically house for
people in here. Now I also want to
use a wardrobe. Now I have a wardrobe
for this entire area. I'm closing my niche here. On one side I have the beds
and on the other piece of wardrobe that marks the end
of my entryway corridor. This would be quite nice. Because I have so much
area for lying down here, I'm also thinking
it would be nice to have another seating area which could contain more
storage space underneath. But will collaborate
with this area here, making it also a day bed. The lounge area. On one side, I could
have more guests over. On the other, I could have a
bedroom and the upper area in the bed lounge area here, and leave this space for a bigger kitchen and
perhaps a working area. How else might we solve the bed situation by
making things compact? For example we can have
this case where the bed is exactly 2m long and 30
cm, a freestanding shelf. There isn't much
space for nightstand, but you could theoretically
use these spaces. Then underneath the bed, there are drawers that you can pull out and
have a bit of storage. Additionally, you
have storage here. Of course, small ladder
to jump into bed. Theoretically this could be a very small and
compact situation. And you can hide the bed
behind this furniture piece. It would look really beautiful at least
from the living room. You wouldn't have to
look into the bedroom. It creates a niche of its own. I really like that. I also like the idea
that I can hide my bed behind the
piece of furniture and have some intimacy here and
a place to put my things and as well as storage
piece of all things. I have have storage here, I have bed here, have intimacy. I have also a lot of
space for storage for.
11. Compactness / Part 2: We're going to show
you two more ways to create a compact piece of
furniture in your bedroom. I'm sure there are many
more ways to do this. I'm just trying to
spur your imagination, to think differently
about your space, and see how many ways your tiny space can
actually support you. Often you don't need to move but just think harder
about your space. These two solutions are
actually very popular in Asia. 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 centimeters from
the actual floor. This would create a space
of compartments with little doors where you can store things much like a bento box. 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
is not a problem and could definitely
solve a lot of stories. Imagine 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 debit
or even a sleeping area and just look 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. 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 living room. But this could also be part of the living
room during the day. It's quite nice. I like that. It also released me
from a lot of storage. My living room area might
be actually quite free from any 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's a reason why
there is a distance of about 90 centimeters between
your window and the floor. That is to ensure the
safety of people living in. You don't want
people to fall out your window, that's
very dangerous. This is ensured by creating the safe distance
of 90 centimeters. But if you are diminishing
this safe distance, then this window can possibly
be a danger for children or for people who 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 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 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. I'm going to turn
off this solution and go to the next solution. Instead of 30 centimeters
away from the floor, it's 45. Forty-five 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 felt that this wardrobe
could become a little shorter. The reason for that is
I would like to change the bathroom wall with one where the light would
still come through. Now I have my little piece
here towards Rabin's going up to this height
where I can still allow some natural light to
go through into my bathroom. I wonder what else
I can do with it. Because our floor is at
the height of a chair, I thought it would be nice to actually sit on it
during the day as well. If we are to sit on it, why not have a table here? That the window, I mean, it's going to be my
day, but also my chair. I'm going to add my table.
This is quite cool. I have my wardrobe here, I have some drawers
here, which I can pull. I have my bed which
I can sleep on, but also sit on and
work during the day. I have quite a lot of storage. Just think of all
the chapters here in 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 stockier. You can have a lady
here sitting for you to understand
how this would work. Of course, everything
needs detailing, like how this nice
table is going to be fixed on the wall as
well as the drawers. At the moment we're just
sketching and exploring ideas. But assigning on any of
these compact solutions needs to be discussed with the carpenter really thoroughly. Just going to turn on
my pillows as well. Suddenly I have a bell, but also a day-by-day
and storage piece in the wardrobe and
the workspace area. This is quite cool. Suddenly I have quite
a bit of space here which is very free of storage and workspace
and definitely over 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 things I can certainly do with the
rest of the space, which I couldn't
imagine doing before. 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? Use 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 encourage
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'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
slept from left to right, but we still want to mask our bedroom area at least
for a couple of hours. 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 the 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. Very simply you've created
some degree of privacy. 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 effect in the room, as well as temporarily mask
one space from the other. Some people like them
really semi-transparent, and so they are unified elements with perhaps the
curtains and 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 theaters or opera. It's a very thick
material and very porous. It's probably more expensive
than a normal drapery. Also the cleaning is not something that you
can do independently, because probably it
have to be dry cleaned. But other than that
if you can have some sound privacy as well, you can talk in the room, and not be heard in
the other or not be heard quite as loudly as you would if you
didn't have anything. I encourage you to use
curtains if you want to create a more fluid and more
flexible kind of privacy. What I like about
curtains also is that, if you don't pull
them all the way, they allow for local privacy. Then your gaze can still go through these areas here and you can still see the
wall in the back-end. In your mind, you still have the impression
of living 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
hanging from the ceiling. I really like this room divider. It's 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 shoe box with a
feeling of exuberance. I like big patterns because
they can really give that boy his joyful
expensive even look. You feel like you live in an expensive hotel room rather
than in a tiny shoe box. Often paying a
little bit more for beautiful wallpaper
or a room divider, it's worth it only
for the feeling that it gives you the impression of living in really nice
and well-designed space. What I like about these
room dividers also 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. It comes in all kinds of colors, so you can create different
kinds of color patterns, and it can have a
different effect every day if you want to. At the same time still allows for your gaze to go through. It's quite nice. It has a very joyful effect. Another room divider that I like is this one called Tekton. 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. It creates this beautiful effect and this impression of privacy. It feels again, like luxurious place rather
than a tiny shoe. 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. If you wanted to watch movies, you could watch him from bed
or from your living room. I think that's also
quite nice because it acts as an object that
has doubled function. On one side can have your
evening cinema moment, and the same time it also
acts as a privacy element. Another type of
partition is furniture. We've touched on this
topic a couple of times, but I wanted 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'm going to show you is this table mixed
with a shelf, can easily put this at
the end of your pet. You will see some
version of this in high-end hotels to access an element that shows that
the bedroom and here, and the living lounge area
workspace starts here. It's really nice that you
can one side work and on the other actually have privacy once you fill in
all the shelves. I really liked 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 probably not install it here because as you remember, it's not quite aligned
with my bathroom wall. That's because my bed
is two meters seven, and my structural here
is about 30 centimeters. It's a little bit more
than two-thirds the length of my bathroom wall. But that's not a problem, I would probably adapt the structure or I would
make a new type of shelf, or 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'm 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
freestanding shelf, and that's quite nice. There you can have elements where you can see
through in the bedroom. My sense of space is not
limited by this divider alone. They still feel like I live
in a generous large space, but at the same time, it creates the privacy
for my bedroom. Of course, freestanding shelves come in all shapes and sizes, so I'm just going to show you another one where the shelves
have a bigger division, and it creates a kind of
pattern in my living room. At the same time, it's
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 that privacy, which is really nice. These are a couple
of ideas that I have for furniture room, the liners that I hope
some of them would actually inspire you
for your own home.
13. Partitions / Part 2: But if we want to have
a look at the beds that we created in our class
about compactness, and not so much the 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. 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 Tekton
divider to put it on top of our bed so we can
preserve this line here. As it happens, this protection
wall is actually made of wood and it's quite mean if we calculate all these
pieces of wood here. It can be quite heavy. It's possible that our
beds structure here might not be enough to hold
together so much weight, so we will probably
have to reinforce our bed structure with
a much thicker beam. If that's the case, then we're probably
not going to be able to use our drawers here. This version is
probably not very good. If I still want to
use this divider, I'll 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. I might in fact turn this off and use this separation wall, which is much nicer because
it hangs from the ceiling and stops right on top of my bed and it puts
no weight on my bed. Therefore, I can still use
my drawers on this side. Then if I still
like the other one, how else might I
design this area here? Another option is
to put it in front. If I put it in front, I will not be able
to use 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 be a little shorter and have a little
bit of space for my divider. So now when I put my divider, 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. That shouldn't be too bad. Now that I have these
three elements together, I might redesign each of them according to what effect
I want to achieve. 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 would 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 the glass area here. Not transparent. It
can be mini-glass, but it should be no problem. There's a third solution
for this division wall, in that to put it in front
of my bathroom wall, so if I turn on
my bathroom wall, then my division
wall comes in front. 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's two meter 30 again. But I'd like to carry my
separation wall all the way to the back so it's both a
cladding and a division wall, and therefore I have a
more uniform surface on this area here. It has a really luxurious
and beautiful effect in a small place. I might want to keep this. 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? 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? 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? I feel like it makes 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. I might go for
this version here. 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. Liking this, I'm
wondering if I could perhaps continue with my
room divider here as well. Now I have my own little
nest here where I can sleep, and I don't have to look into my bedroom from my living room. I think that's quite nice. Now if I change
my bathroom wall, maybe with a glass
partition here, I think that would be quite
nice because on one side, I will have the light going
through my bathroom wall and 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're sitting
in the chair. So 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 blooming and say, wait a minute, I could hang this
piece here from the ceiling and of course, it has its own
beautiful pattern. It creates a certain
effect in my bedroom. It's also probably
cheaper because it's a smaller surface
than the other ones. Voila, I have my
own room divider. I don't have to look
into my bed here, and creates a really nice effect towards the living room area. 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 will also create
my custom piece of furniture all the way to the
edge of the bathroom wall. When I design it, I didn't think about
any privacy problems. Usually, I gathered 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. 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. 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 10. Now I have enough space to
maybe fix a curtain rod, and therefore a curtain. 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. This is how it will look
like with the curtain. My furniture element is behind. The curtain version
is definitely something that I
would definitely appreciate and it feels
light and easy to implement. 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: 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 normally, it might not bother you so much. Check if you have enough space for a wardrobe in
the entryway area. Typically wardrobes
are 60 centimeters wide and in front of them you will need at least
one meter, 1.20 meter. This really depends on how your doors of this
wardrobe actually open. They open towards
your space here. You need about a
meter, 1.20 meter. If you have sliding doors, this might not be an issue. You can even have 80 centimeters
in your entryway area. I would not recommend
less than that because it might go against fire
escape regulations. 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, I'm always using
entire surfaces. 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 broken pieces of
different size storage spaces. 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. I'm looking for having a
storage space like this and 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 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 your children, and if you have kids during
the day or more family, you can definitely expand
other things in this area, the tables and chairs. Perhaps 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 wall that
you can use for storage is the one
in the living room. This is what we originally
had as a volume. 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 area. You see, even with these relatively compact
and big storage elements, I still have quite
a bit of free space to play here in my area. I might also decide to say, no, I actually need even
more storage space. Then I might want to
create an element that has a little bit
of playfulness in it with open and closed
shelves that part of it will be part for my
kitchen and part of it for my living room and
have opened and closed spaces and it would
create a beautiful pattern, and it would simply
be a little bit more interesting than
what I had before. It's just about using the entire surface.
I might not need it. If I have this living room here, it's possible that my bedroom here is too much, is 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, and what you can do. Usually when there
are small apartments, we need to think about
how much we 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 entryway, 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. Think about how you can push the storage towards the entryway and think about how the doors
of your wardrobe will open. Push it towards the
extremities of your wall, in this case the bedroom
and the 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 in 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 flexibility. The reason for that is
because I believe that small spaces can really benefit
from flexible furniture. 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 the bedroom and
the living room, or a workspace and
a living room, or a kitchen and a 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 setups. 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 a refrigerator, and some storage that
continues in my living room, where I also have my workspace and the 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. 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. 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 opened 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 bed 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 this wardrobe. I'm just going to show
you how it looks like. This is how my bed
would be pushed back. Suddenly I have a lot of
space to work with here. I've 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 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 have a
massive couch here in the middle or a
massive wardrobe, then the flexibility
would be much lower. This setup is very useful if you have a big fluctuation 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 what
it can do during the day to what it can
do during the night and having more flexible furniture can definitely support that. I'm just going to show you what you can do in
these conditions. 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 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. I could have here a
very soft area where grownups or kids could
sit and lie around and talk and I can use
my two coffee tables to have drinks spread out. Then I can also turn
my table here to make it into a party table like this. I can also turn my
chair here around. Now I have a
full-blown party setup for people coming
over and guests. 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. Now, I have more
space 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, a number of opportunities
that you will otherwise not have in a space
as small as this. 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. 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 can take
something away from this class is that it doesn't really matter how
small a place is, but how small a place feels. 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 okay. But if you have two already, the space starts to
feel 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. 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? One way to do that is to
use some optical illusions. What I mean by that
is, us as humans, when we're standing we're
always looking ahead and we're approximating the
distance in front of us. 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 the
impression of a big space. For small spaces, it's a little clever not to use the typical storage pieces that bigger apartments or
normal size apartments 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. 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 to mark my ceiling. Now there are all kinds
of systems for ceiling. As I'm in the sketch mode, I've barely started my project, I'm only sketching that
it 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. Definitely at the entryway in front of the
bathroom on corridors, anywhere where you do not
spend that much time. You can leave it
as low as you can. For example, here I have
two meter 20 floor height. There's just 10 centimeters
above a normal door. Because our apartment has
two meter 80-floor height, this is probably 60
centimeters all in all. Where else might I be
able to store things? I can definitely store
things above my kitchen. I can definitely mark
this area here as a surface zone and
here the 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. Now I can have more storage
space underneath here. Probably not entirely,
but I can definitely use more surface
to store things. Now I've made my surface
area a little wider. I can also use this area
here at the wardrobe. Now my wardrobe here is aligned
with my kitchen island. That's quite nice and my
ceiling here stops here. That doesn't really bother me, really because the
living room area is left alone and it feels
just as long as before. Having a lower ceiling here doesn't quite
bother me that much. 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, but perhaps you don't even
have to use this part. So you can also make the ceiling a little
lower strategically, so only at the entryway and only above this
kitchen island, leaving the kitchen
as tall 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 will definitely try to show
you where else it might go. Wherever you do not
spend any time. As we created here, the corridor that goes left to our bedroom and
right to our living room, I might be able to add
another piece here. I might say I'm adding here another lowered ceiling
where I can store things, which also marks 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
need for more storage, I could also recommend it here. Now these details are the stuff that keeps architects
at night awake. [LAUGHTER] I'm not
going to 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. 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. In this case is
actually completed. 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. 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 keep 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. 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 keeps walls free. Therefore the impression
that your apartment is as big as it is and
not smaller is there. Even if I turn on
the middle ceiling, my view towards this
wall is not obstructed. 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 other wardrobe, then you would feel smaller. It's always good to
store things either in the ceiling area or
in the floor area. For example, with this one, I get to store all my
things in the ceiling, in the wardrobe, in the floor. 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 it can be. If you start filling
all your walls, it will start to
feel smaller again. You have to use
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? Hatch 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 going to
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. The first thing I
do when I enter into a space is my
eyes are looking around and my mind is estimating
the distances around me. It's always useful if you want to make your
space look a little bigger to use mirrors right
where my gaze is going. Often, it's useful to use this mirrors in a symmetry
axis or mid points. If I were to look at
my apartment here, it could be useful to have a
mirror right at the end of the midpoint x of this entryway. If I were to pull an x here, then it would be useful to have a mirror at the end of this x. But unfortunately my x here
is not quite the midpoint between these two
and it wouldn't feel naturally if I put a
mirror right here. But it would feel
natural if I were to put a mirror between
these two elements. If I were to make an x
at the midpoint here, I could technically
insert a mirror. 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. I can easily turn on
the second mirror. 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
would definitely be in the case of my bedroom
here it has no door, having a symmetry line would definitely make the
partner look much more interesting and it would work really well if the furniture would support the
symmetry as well. If I were to use my original
bed and side tables, then this will definitely
make a lot of sense. If I were on the other hand
to say, you know what? It's not too 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 center going
towards this bed here, I feel like the
mirror that might be better placed on this
side or that this wall would work on a
better composition with perhaps more art or a
different kind of arrangement. 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 [inaudible] 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. If your furniture is asymmetrically placed
in the bedroom, then perhaps this
location is not ideal. I'm just going to
turn off this mirror. 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 space, would be actually
the symmetry line of the bed but not the
entire construction. This is what it looks like. Since we are speaking about placing mirrors into
your apartment, I would encourage
you to also align these mirrors with other
elements in your home. First of all it
would be great if it was exactly at eyesight, so the center of the
mirror should be somewhere at the height of
160, 170, probably 160. It depends on how
big the mirror is, at 150, 160 probably there. Whenever a person
would stroll around, he would look straight
into this mirror. Then the second idea is to just align this mirror
with other elements. If I have this element here, I wouldn't want it a
mirror to go any further. If I had another piece
of art hanging here, I will try to make
these two elements be located on the same height. In this case, I might pull an x here and then I might pull an x 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 you would definitely
make a lot more sense 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. 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 mirror 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. Use mirrors and use them strategically in location
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 and 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 who can benefit from kitchen, specifically, are very customizable pieces of furniture and their
real value lies in the 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. Here are 10 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, is packed with information about standard dimensions
and the entire world of the build space. But specifically for homes, you will learn not 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. If you have any questions, do let me know in the comments.
20. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you have made it to the end of the class. I hope you learned
some new things and already feel
inspired to apply them. If you wish to expand
your knowledge even further on this topic, I encourage you to go to my
Skillshare teacher profile. There you will find
more classes on complimentary topics which I
have no doubt you will love. If you're craving even more, I highly recommend that you explore the wealth of
resources available on my website and within the attached bonus
resources PDF. There you discover more classes, book suggestions, and free
complimentary worksheets. Particularly the worksheets
will help you deepen your understanding of the
topics discussed in the class, and identify the
changes that will have the biggest impact on
your personal well-being. If you're interested in more
freebies or live classes, I encourage you to sign
up to my newsletter. Each Sunday I send out home
design ideas straight to your inbox all tailored to promote a home that will
help you become happier, healthier, and more creative. You'll be kept in the loop about my monthly Zoom calls
and special events. That's where I have
big free resources, book recommendations,
and I'll let you know about upcoming classes. If you like this class, I would appreciate the review. It tells Skillshare that
you like my class and it encourages other people
to discover my work. Please use the discussion
section to let me know your thoughts and
questions about the class. I'll be happy to help you clarify any concept
you do not understand. Additionally, if you
leave a class project, I will be able to help you
with more personalized and in-depth support so
I encourage you to share your home design
progress with me. We are at the end. See you in the next class.
Ana Marcu, Home Wellbeing, Licensed architect
