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When you stroll outside on a bustling street in a city like New York or Singapore, you may find yourself peculiarly ensnared by a ring of skyscrapers that each house hundreds of people. Today, the complexity and capability of our industrial processes have prepared the world for apartment-style housing never like anything before, transcending the boundaries of typical “house” definitions, such as “must include one ground floor and one or more upper stories.”
(Purples Blog, 2018)
In fact, not only were industrial contrivances responsible for this evolution in human housing, but the population was also a driving force. Worldometers (2024) show that in 1500, there were only 0.45 billion people on Earth, whereas today, more than eight people populate our planet. With such rapid population growth, the demand for housing has skyrocketed. Although this was easily mitigated by development in regions with affluent land, cities with a much higher population density struggled with low-story housing and instead strived for apartment-style housing where many families could utilize one land area at once without interfering with each other’s daily lives. (Britannica, 2024)
With so many families moving into apartments, one of the main downsides of an apartment-style house becomes increasingly apparent: its lack of space. Today, we will explore a series of ways families can effectively utilize the limited space they own.
Optimization of Vertical Space
In a single to double-story apartment, horizontal space is scarce, so utilizing the vertical space you have to increase storage space is key to optimizing apartment space. Use wall-mounted cabinets, shelves, and storage units to increase your storage area without taking up much of your ground space.
Maximizing the wall space for storage cabinets can increase storage and create the illusion of a larger room. It would also be a good idea to split the wall vertically into two halves, one for cabinets and the other for a wall-mounted tabletop. Another alternative is to install tall closets instead of wide dressers, as most modern flats are tall and accommodating (The Studios, 2023).
Minimize the number of rooms
If you have the opportunity, try to minimize the number of rooms in your apartment. A room is a space within the house defined by walls around it that is only accessible through a door of sorts. An everyday strategy used to inflate the prices of apartments in the housing market is installing excess walls within an already small apartment to make it more valuable on paper (since it has more rooms). However, this compromises the individual space of each room and the overall cohesiveness of the house.
To maximize an apartment's space, a design principle similar to that of the Farnsworth House in Chicago can be used. In this principle, different “rooms” traditionally are located within a singular area but divided into zones distinguished by their furnishings. For example, the bedroom zone has a bed, a nightstand, and a lamp. In a city apartment, families can combine multiple spaces like the living room, dining room, office space, or even a bedroom into one space, increasing the space's usability and easing room circulation.
Multi-use furniture
Nothing beats seeing the fantastic transition of a seemingly ordinary sofa into a king-sized bed. Using transformative and multi-use furniture is one of the basics of utilizing the space of a studio apartment. You can also try beds or furniture that can also act as storage units or have drawers built in, as storage is the biggest issue for apartment households most of the time. Other than seating furniture, shelving units can also be shrewdly used as space separators that function as storage space, meeting the tip we mentioned before about merging spaces into one. As a bonus, full length mirrors are also outstanding elements of a room to consider, as they subconsciously convince your brain that the room is bigger than it already is.
Organizational efforts
Not only does the interior design of the apartment matter for proper space optimization and management, but the owner also has to put effort into cleaning to make the space as clean and tidy as possible. It would be futile to pour countless hours into designing an organized space with all kinds of organizational elements only for the owner not to pay attention to the cleaning duties. Remove any items you no longer need, like product boxes or lacerated clothing, and keep the space as tidy as possible by utilizing the storage spaces you have correctly. (Houzz, 2018)
Conclusion
That’s it. Hopefully, you have learned numerous niche tricks that will be useful when organizing your apartment house. Remember, whether a space is “comfortable” depends entirely on the person who lives there. People’s rooms often reflect their personalities and habits, so my best tip would be to choose what best fits your lifestyle.
Works Cited
Kunnath, V. (2018). 11 Ingenious Ways to Maximise Space in a Studio Apartment. [online] Houzz. Available at: https://www.houzz.in/magazine/11-ingenious-ways-to-maximise-space-in-a-studio-apartment-stsetivw-vs~104980628 [Accessed 9 Oct. 2024].
Purple Group (2018). A life in a House Versus an Apartment: A Comparison - Purples Blog. [online] Purples Blog. Available at: https://purples.co.in/blog/house-versus-apartment/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2024].
The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica (2024). Apartment house | architecture. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/technology/apartment-house.
The Studios (2023). Ten tips Space Optimisation | TheStudios. [online] The Studios. Available at: https://www.thestudios.com/10-tips-for-space-optimisation-in-a-studio-flat/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2024].
Worldometer (2024). World Population Clock: 7.8 Billion People (2020) - Worldometer. [online] www.worldometers.info. Available at: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population.
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