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Clever Tiny Parisian Apartment Designed for a Young Couple

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How tiny is this apartment? What you see is the whole thing.

It’s simultaneously a very spacious kitchen and a very spacious bathroom (and a sleeping loft with a very long view).

Amber lighting is used to emphasise the interesting changing light-scapes that are created as day changes to night.

From the other end of the same room, looking the opposite way, the bathroom also feels like the entire room.

Like many successful designs for tiny spaces, each room ‘steals’ from the others.

And similarly, from the kitchen, there is no sense of a bathroom in the space, which makes up for its size limits by its unlimited changes in lighting.

The kitchen sinkbench can be considered a comfortable reading nook – at least for the young and hip.

Amber lights in the recess space create a different mood in the bathroom under the sleeping loft.

At night the bathroom is transformed, with the central board like a lit up like a beacon.

Stairs to the sleeping loft look like a work of art, not a way somewhere.

With just the amber light on at night, the warmth counteracts the usual “bathroom” feel sense to create something cosier.

The two amber lights create the allusion to a candle for lighting the way up to bed.

This creative solution to stair space is appropriate for the youthful design aesthetic.

Stairs are the most minimal possible: simply treads.

It’s not for everyone. These young things couldn’t come home drunk and try to get up to bed on these precarious stairs.

And there is no toilet in this simple bathroom. (Many older Parisian apartments have shared toilets on the stairs.)

And I think they’ll eventually find there really is a need for a ‘sofa’ of some sort somewhere here. Dangling feet doesn’t make for relaxation.

A loft sofa above the kitchen bench, facing the window? Or extend the top stair to the window, and add a sofa back, making a loft sofa where he is sitting?

In any case, here is what they started with, a very unprepossessing space as it was before the renovation.

This is the view from what is now the bathroom: it was barely more than a hallway.

Arresting lighting and these few simple elements have made for a hip home of many moods out of a very tiny and unusable space.

The kudos go to French firm Betillon Dorval-Bory.