You never know how someone else’s creative custom solution for their tiny space could influence your own projects, or just help you organize your home a little more efficiently. Get lots of space-saving inspiration from this collection of well-executed lofts, transforming built-ins, custom shelving, storage platforms, swiss army kitchen islands and more.

Combo Office, Entertainment Center & Guest Bed for a London Micro Apartment

A young buyer moving into a London apartment measuring just 376 square feet commissioned CIAO Architects to custom-design the interiors with bespoke space-saving furniture. Not only does this particular piece combine an entertainment center, a desk and a room divider, it also pulls an extra bed out from underneath the main bed that’s raised on a platform just behind it. Then, both the owner and a guest can sleep in what feels like separate bedrooms.

A Closet Office/Reading Nook Combo

Could you sacrifice a closet to receive an office in return? This setup combines a small corner desk, shelving and a reading nook in a space that would normally be dark and, depending on how you’ve organized it, potentially difficult to use to its full potential. Add some storage under the nook seat and you’re really using that space efficiently.

A Half-Loft with Storage Underneath

If you’ve got plenty of vertical space, but not much floor space, check this out. Chelsea and Ryan, the owners of this Toronto apartment, built a DIY loft that raises the bed just about halfway to the ceiling in order to use the storage space beneath it more effectively, Plus, they use the open wall space on either side of the bed as a closet.

Everything You Need in Sweden’s Smallest Apartment

Looking like no more than a shed from the outside, this tiny cottage built as affordable housing for students in Lund, Sweden doesn’t seem like it could possibly offer much until you see the inside. There’s a workspace tucked under the bed loft, a mini closet, a dining table for two with storage above it, a kitchenette, a bathroom and lots of racks and shelves. Those skylights help a lot, too.

Platform Window Seat with Lots of Storage Underneath

Prior to renovation, this apartment in Barcelona required an awkward step up onto the slightly elevated terrace. The aptly named Nook Architects decided to make that platform an intentional part of the living space by extending it into the room and inserting storage beneath it.

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Space Saving Inspiration 14 Gorgeous Lofts Nooks And Smart Layouts

A lot of the most impressive space-saving ideas really only work for wealthier urbanite apartment owners who can simply hire a contractor to design a bunch of customized built-ins. The results – like beds that lower from the ceiling at the push of a button – are often undeniably cool and effective, but not exactly accessible to most of us. For the renter with an average income, tiny space hacks need to be cheaper and way more portable. Here are 15 ideas that are either commercially available for less than the price of your first-born child, or could serve as inspiration for something to build yourself.

Fold-Up Walk-In Wardrobe

How luxurious must it feel to have the kind of walk-in closet full of beautiful wooden built-in shelves and drawers, with space to organize all of your shoes, accessories and clothing? Hosun Ching applies this concept to a fold-out wardrobe with additional storage in the doors, transforming into a sort of portable walk-in. There are mirrors on both sides, too, so you can see your outfits from every angle.

“The depth of a standard wardrobe is 60cm,” says Ching. “That is simply not practical, because it means that you literally lose sight of your clothing; and what you don’t see, you don’t wear. The Walk-In Closet is a small storage unit designed to solve this problem. The focus is on organization and visibility. There are drawers for accessories and the reduced depth does away with those ‘hidden’ stacks.”

DIY Breakfast Nook with a View

Turn any available window in your space into a cafe table with a view simply by adding a shelf and a chair or a couple bar stools. It takes up practically zero space, installs in mere minutes and makes a big impact.

The Hobby Box Craft Cabinet

Got a lot of crafting materials or art supplies? The HobbyBox by The Original Scrapbox Company has space for everything, keeping papers neatly organized, protected and individually visible. In addition to a whole lot of internal shelving, this craft cabinet features a small wall of magnetic storage and some hooks for hanging certain items. It also comes with a fold-down work table, a daylight LED light, 22 clear acrylic totes and 7 clear zipper pouches. The company has other versions of this cabinet that are customized for other activities, like sewing, as well as narrow storage towers and storage desks with clear tops so you can see all your supplies from above. Being able to closet it all up when you’re done eliminates a whole lot of visual clutter in a small space.

Space-Saving Living Cubes

Few things make more of an impact in a small space than the ‘all-in-one living cube,’ a freestanding piece of mega-furniture that typically incorporates a bed, storage and perhaps a desk or couch into the same unit. This one, the Kammerspiel by Nils Holger Moormann, is designed to stand in the center of a studio apartment, dividing up the space and offering just about everything you need. It even has a mini kitchen and a walk-in wardrobe.

“At a time when affordable living space is becoming scarce and the grand opera is not always possible, a Kammerspiel – or intimate theater – can be a fitting alternative,” says Moormann of his creation. “It’s a room within a room, condensing enough features and space to take the airiness of the rest of the apartment into consideration.”

Endlessly Customizable Peg Board Walls

Spotted here at a compact Budapest AirBnB designed by local firm Position Collective, pegboard walls prove they don’t have to be relegated to dirty garages to be handy. This one is made of a smoother-grained plywood, with pegs supporting custom shelves. You could mount these to the wall and have an endlessly customizable shelving arrangement without drilling a bunch of holes in your rental.

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Portable Walk In Closets 14 Other Ways To Make A Studio Feel Like A Mansion

Does the same childlike awe and sense of infinite possibility you felt when looking at pop-up books as a kid translate to adult-sized versions of pop-up furniture, rooms and even entire houses today? These transforming objects dramatically expand from a flat package just by pulling on one end, revealing themselves to be surprisingly strong and usable three-dimensional objects.

Pop-Up Interactive Apartment

This ‘pop-up interactive apartment’ by students at TU Delft adapts to inhabitants’ needs by constantly changing functions, bending and sliding folding polypropylene panels to offer chairs, beds, desks and other furniture or fold up out of the way. The result is an apartment that transforms to use a single room for many functions, without requiring any physical effort on behalf of the people who use the space.

Folding Flat-Pack M.A.Di House

This flat-pack house comes in a folded sheet with connected roof panels that pop up into an A-frame with the help of a crane. Once the easy-to-transport 5-foot-tall package is onsite, it takes less than a day to install, and it comes in several different sizes from a 495-square-foot studio to a 904-square-foot family home. The profile and hinges are made of steel, while much of the rest of the home is made of strong and durable cross-laminated timber (CLT) making the whole structure earthquake-resistant.

De-Dimension Furniture by Jongha Choi

Take this two-dimensional geometric wall art down, unfold it in one swift motion, place it on the floor and you’ve got a piece of furniture. ‘De-Dimension’ is a series of pop-up flat-pack furniture by designer Jongha Choi representing his ideas about perspective. “If our perception of an object is not different on a plane image and an actual subject, isn’t it possible to substitute the two with each other?”

Pop-Up Shelf by Meike Harde

How much bookcase do you really need? Maybe you could use a full-height storage piece, or maybe you want it to be shorter to fit beneath a window. German designer Meike Harde’s ‘Stockwerk’ shelf comes as a flat-pack item and easily expands without the need for tools, with pieces that fit together like a puzzle.

Slinky-Style Accordion Chairs That Stretch and Bend

Like a slinky, the Flexible Love Sofa and Chair start out tightly packed into a small package and then expand to surprising lengths when you pull on either end. The furniture series is made from 100% recycled paper, yet the sofa can hold up to 4,232 pounds when fully expanded, and snap back to a mere 5 inches in width when contracted.

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Step Into A Pop Up Book 11 Furnishings Rooms Houses That Fold Up Flat

When you’re lazy, even the most intuitive transforming furniture isn’t easy enough to operate unless it’s on the same level as clapping your lights on and off. Luckily for those of us who fall into this category, some furniture makers are creating multifunctional designs for small spaces that work their magic at the push of a button, the pull of a string, a flick of the wrist or even a mere gesture.

Retractible Ollie Chair by RockPaperRobot

You really have to watch the video of how this chair works to fully appreciate its brilliant simplicity. It starts as an entirely flat panel of slatted teak wood with a slight curve at the top. Pick it up, pull a string and the whole thing unfurls into a seat in a single fluid motion that’s very satisfying to watch, and it works the same way in reverse. The slats are affixed to a textile canvas to make the seating flexible, and the rest takes folding inspiration from origami.

A-Board Flat-Pack Shelf

This bookshelf starts as a flat piece of laser-cut plywood. Yang the orange ribbon on the back, and it will pull the shelves down perpendicular to the face so you can rest the whole thing against a wall and use it as a bookshelf. Designer Tomas Schön used a laser-cutting technique to bend the wood instead of hinges, and there’s no other hardware or even glue involved.

MIT Media Lab CityHome

Still not easy enough for you? How about commanding your bed to slide out with a gesture of your hands? MIT’s robotic ‘home in a box’ can pack a full, spacious-feeling apartment into 200 square feet of space, including a bed, workspace, dining table for dix, storage and a mini kitchen. The box uses built-in sensors, motors, LED lights and low-friction rollers to respond to your voice commands or gestures.

Ori Robotic Home Controlled via Smartphone App

There are all sorts of complex transforming furniture systems designed to fit maximum function into small spaces, but how many of them are operated through a smartphone app? The Ori system (taking its name from the prefix of ‘origami’) runs on robotic technology, featuring an on-device user interface as well as an app for your handheld device so you can press a button to initiate various configurations, like the bed sliding out, the table folding down or the entire unit moving to tuck itself against a wall to open up the floor area.

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Just Pull Some Strings 8 Easy Transforming Furniture Designs For Lazy People

Think you’ve seen it all when it comes to ideas for saving space in small houses and apartments? Beijing’s B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio is here to prove you wrong in the most delightful way, with a series of transforming elements and incredibly clever layouts in two tiny ‘hutong’ alley houses. Working with lots as small as 258 square feet that are squashed between existing buildings, the architects managed to produce functional, comfortable, private residences full of natural daylight and enough space for multi-generational families.

Both homes butt up against other structures, making it impossible to incorporate windows into the design. B.L.U.E. added skylights to both, utilizing open-plan lofted layouts inside to encourage a bright and cheerful atmosphere. The first home is on a narrow L-shaped lot and features a cool glass-filled rear wall that opens all the way up to the courtyard.

Inside, beds and children’s play areas are lofted above a pale wooden built-in full of sliding elements, fold-down tables, transforming stairs, beds that instantly double in size, retractible walls and a modest-sized table that expands to seat six diners.

The second house is even smaller, with a nearly-identical arrangement of skylights and cabinet-packed walls revealing an array of unexpected features when opened. Extra countertops and work surfaces pop out of the wall facing the galley kitchen, and storage space stretches from the floor to the ceiling.

Beneath the lofted bedrooms for the owners and their kids, a third bedroom area doubles as an extra dining space. Remove the mattress to reveal a pop-up table and cushioned bench seating that you climb into like a retro conversation pit, or lay it back down and pull down the blinds for privacy. A second table folds down from the adjacent wall in seconds, with storage cubes doubling as stools.

From the pictures, it looks like there are even more built-in elements that aren’t demonstrated in GIF form, like a mysterious hatch in the dining room floor. The whole setup is clean, modern and uncluttered enough for a minimalist’s sensibilities despite so many people living in such a small space – an inspiration for all the tricks and hacks we’re going to have to come up with to boost housing density in cities with burgeoning populations.