A big plan for a small flat: thinking in 60 square metres

Homes in cities are shrinking; flats of 50–70 square metres are no longer the exception but the rule. At this scale most flats are planned as a shrunken copy of a larger house: the same rooms, the same corridor, just narrower. The result is a home in which no room really works. Good planning in a small flat starts not by shrinking rooms but by removing some altogether and letting spaces be shared.

Our first enemy is the corridor. In a 60-square-metre flat a corridor of six or seven square metres is more than ten per cent of the total area, and that area does nothing. Routing circulation through the rooms, opening the entrance straight into the living space, or using the corridor as a wall of storage are ways to win it back. When we removed the partitions in the Nişantaşı rooftop flat and placed a steel-framed glazed screen between living room and study, the light beneath the ridge reached the whole flat for the first time.

Storage is the hidden problem of small flats. Without enough cupboards, belongings spread across every surface and the home looks even smaller. We prefer to design storage as a single surface built into the walls and reaching the ceiling. A wall of cupboards with doors the same colour as the wall, without handles and with fine joints, doesn’t make the room smaller; it calms it. The rule is simple: if there is a cupboard, take it to the ceiling; otherwise, none at all.

Flexible space is a real gain in small flats, but it must be thought through. Fold-down beds and transforming furniture look good on paper; in real life they are often opened once and never put away. Instead we propose sliding partitions and dual-purpose rooms: a guest room that is a study by day, a sleeping alcove that can be closed off but mostly stays open. Flexibility must be simple enough that people will actually use it.

Light and lines of sight are the most powerful tools for making a small space feel large. Standing in the entrance, a line of sight running from one end of the flat to the other, ideally to a window, makes the space feel wider than it is. Glazed fanlights over internal doors bring light to the rear rooms. Leaving ceilings and walls pale while keeping the floor dark and warm lends the space depth.

Finally, the number of materials in a small flat should be reduced. A different material on every surface breaks the space into pieces and makes it look crowded. Our suggestion is three main materials at most: a floor, a wall and an accent. In the Nişantaşı rooftop flat that trio was wide-plank oak, the matt white sloping ceiling and a dark steel screen; the roof windows add the sky to this plain palette.