You don’t have to drastically shrink your whole life to fit into a 200-square-foot space in order to learn a space-saving trick or two from the tiny house movement. Builders and carpenters see working with such a compact living space like a puzzle, and they’ve come up with some pretty cool solutions that translate well to small rooms and apartments.

Raise & Lower Your Loft Bed at the Push of a Button

Carpenter Ana White built this incredible elevator bed for a tiny house she created. The bed raises or lowers over the couch using sliding door hardware and a garage cargo lift that costs about $200. The platform can be raised all the way to the ceiling during the day, lowered all the way down at night, or stopped halfway so both the loft bed and the guest bed below it can be used. White has more information on this system (and free plans for this tiny house design) available at her website.

Put Your Couch (or Bed) on a Platform

There are lots of ways to either craft or hack a platform bed, whether you’ve got the carpentry skills to recreate these two clever tiny house creations or just get some inexpensive items from Ikea and improvise something that’ll give you lots of extra storage space. The stepped system seen in ‘Tre Livelli’ by Studioata is especially cool, eliminating the need for standalone furniture. There’s a whole kitchen hidden in there!

Squeeze Your Closet Under Your Bed

Another cool tiny house trick (often deployed in campers, too) is to place the bed atop a storage area and use a hydraulic lift for easy access to the contents. Italian furniture manufacturer Dielle makes a freestanding version of this that has an entire closet underneath it! DIY-ing a design like this might seem tricky, but you can get a standard bedlift kit for as little as $45. You could also just use the space beneath a lofted bed as a luxurious walk-in closet, as seen in this interior by De La Haye Makelaardij.

Turn the Stairs Into Your Dresser

You don’t even have to have a sleeping loft to make use of a dresser shaped like a staircase. It’s great for accessing high storage, too – like bookshelves hung just beneath the ceiling. And while it’s always helpful to be handy, you don’t even have to custom-make these. Companies like Cymax offer them for as little as $350.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Take It From A Tiny House 12 Smart Small Space Tricks That Really Work

Extending beyond the existing rooftops like a fast-growing plant, this compact cylindrical home slotted into an unused urban plot in Milan features a breathable ‘skin’ connecting the interiors to the outdoors. Designed by New York-based architects SO-IL for Milan Design Week 2017, the MINI LIVING ‘Breathe’ installation is a response to the growing challenge to maximize available space in cities to comfortably accommodate more residences.

Built on a modular metal frame covered with a flexible, semi-translucent envelope that reacts organically to the environment, the home was designed for a family of three, and features six rooms and a lush rooftop garden. The ground floor is transparent to encourage interaction with the world outside; climb the spiraling staircase and you’ll find a series of private spaces for relaxation, work and sleeping, all separated by fabric canopies.

The outer skin lets in filtered sunlight, while the rooftop garden collects rainwater and helps filter the city air. Hammock-like nets suspended from the upper levels look out onto both the city outside and the interiors below. The architects describe the skin as a ‘jacket’ that can be zipped and arranged differently to protect against various external conditions. The more you layer it, the more privacy or water resistance it offers, so inhabitants can customize the needs of different rooms.

The idea, in part, was to ‘tune’ the interiors to the rhythms of the city, the weather and the sun outside, eliminating the closed-off feel that many homes tend to have. While the tent-like design may not be viable for many urban centers where cold weather, rain and theft might be a problem, it’s an intriguing idea for layering with more solid and secure materials like glass.

Could tiny prefabricated stackable mobile housing units help solve homelessness in cities like San Francisco, where nearly 7,000 people sleep in the streets every night? Affordable housing has all but disappeared in the Bay Area, pushing thousands of people out and giving many people nowhere to go. While most developers in San Francisco are busy working on building the kinds of expensive condos that exacerbate the problem, one is offering a potential solution in the form of minimalist pods.

Patrick Kennedy and his team at real estate development and rental company Panoramic Interests present the MicroPAD, a self-contained, 160-square-foot mobile home that can stand alone or be stacked into a complex of up to 300 units. Nine-foot ceilings and generous windows flood the interiors with natural light, and each home contains a bed with storage drawers, a modest kitchenette, armoire closet, desk with chair and shelves, and a bathroom with a toilet and shower.

The units can be manufactured in about a week, exceed California seismic code, are made of non-combustible materials and feature engineered soundproofing and 24/7 filtered ventilation. Ultimately, aside from the size, the MicroPAD offers better quality housing than the more conventional apartments for which many of the city’s residents already pay lots of cash. The size and stickability is a response to the eye-watering $1,200-per-square-foot cost of development within the cramped city – it’s quick and easy to build, and doesn’t take up a lot of space.

Using prefab materials shaves 40% off the cost of conventional construction, and the developers note that the units can be built on, or in the airspaces above, unused and underutilized city-owned lots to further cut costs. At a cost of $1,000 per unit per month, the MicroPAD would come in at well under the average $17,353 currently spent per year on each homeless person in other forms of supportive housing. Panoramic Interests has a bunch of proposals on their site showing how and where the units could be stacked into 33-unit or 300-unit buildings.

Clearly, a lot of thought has been put into this proposal, and the company has already produced a number of prototypes to demonstrate exactly how the units work – one is placed outside Kennedy’s office on Ninth and Mission, a neighborhood with a significant population of homeless people. Of course, in a city where anyone who isn’t a tech worker struggles to get by, this concept could and should be scaled up to offer affordable housing for all.

Plots of land long considered too small and strangely shaped to build upon prove to be more valuable when they seem thanks to some creative thinking. Across the world (put particularly in cramped Tokyo), architects are rising to the challenge to expand available living spaces in heavily populated cities, designing structures that fit these ‘odd lots’ without sacrificing privacy, comfort and outdoor spaces.

Wedge-Shaped Home by Oof! Architecture

The geometry of this triangular site in a residential neighborhood in Melbourne presented a major challenge for OOF! Architecture, especially due to strict building rules. The architects created a three-story structure full of split-level living areas to avoid wasting space on internal walls, doors and hallways.

House in Horinouchi by Mizuishi Architect

One of Tokyo’s most distinctive odd-shaped houses, ‘House in Horinouchi’ by Mizuishi Architect Atelier had to fit within a strip of land roughly the size of a parking spot while still having a place to store bikes outside. The ultra-narrow result features a tapered cantilevered end, a slightly wider area containing the living spaces, and a play loft for the owner’s children.

Grass Cave House by Makiko Tsukada

This plot is squished between several existing houses in the suburbs at an odd angle, which could easily have resulted in a dark structure with very little privacy and no outdoor spaces. Instead, Makiko Tsukada Architects built a step-shaped structure consisting of three grass-covered volumes, including a carport roof and the home itself. Large windows face these elevated lawns to bring sunlight inside.

Mountain House by Hiroki + Tomoko Sekiguchi

Monolithic and windowless from outside, ‘Mountain House’ by Hiroki and Tomoko Sekiguchi Architects has to accommodate a large four-wheel-drive car on its lowest level and contend with the prying eyes of neighbors. The result frames views of the sky and accesses daylight via skylights.

Triangular House by H.ARCHITECTS

Strict Japanese setback requirements prevent architects from building right up to the edge of the plot, including roof overhangs, yet the typical Japanese plot is incredibly small. This one was considered too awkward to build on and used as a parking lot for many years, but H.ARCHITECTS found a solution that makes the most of the adjacent park. A z-shaped interior layout allows for the creation of a few outdoor spaces, like the third floor balcony.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Against All Odd Shapes 12 Homes Tailored To Tiny Difficult Plots

These narrow, movable, single-person residences provide affordable housing for young people shut out of more conventional options by the housing crisis in Europe’s major cities, while also finding uses for a proliferation of vacant lots. The Heijmans ONE project by Netherlands firm Moodworks Architecture can be placed temporarily in virtually any location and takes just one day to set up on the site.

Designed for a single occupant, the house measures 484 square feet and features an energy-efficient solid wood skeleton as well as solar panels to produce its own energy. It features everything you’d expect in a similarly sized apartment, including a kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom and patio, and can be transported via truck to its destination, whether urban or rural.

The target occupants are young professionals who want to buy their own home but are unable to afford quality housing as prices skyrocket well beyond the average person’s means. The project also addresses the issue of derelict sites in cities, taking advantage of all manner of vacant spaces, from construction sites that have been put on hold to lots that are currently up for sale.

The prefabricated houses are available for just 700 Euros per month, and two pilot homes have been placed on Zeeburgereiland in Amsterdam. Contact Heijmans to see them in person by appointment.