Living with Less: First, Hide the Bed
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 09. 4.07
The New York Times has a wonderful monthly feature called Sketch Pad, which "focuses on an apartment, house, loft or shack now for sale that has unrealized potential. Each month, a different architect or designer is asked to create a vision of what the place might look like"
Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita of New York's Front Studio redesigned a 380 square foot straight-line studio for an imaginary client. It is full of great ideas for small spaces; I loved the idea of the trundle bed sliding under the platform. (in most murphy beds, one has to make the bed, remove the clothes on it, and fasten a strap. Here you have the works in a drawer, just push it all under when the doorbell rings)
open and closed: everything hinges and slides, the dining table folds down, the kitchen opens up and the office goes away at night
The architects were asked how they came up with the idea of sliding the bed under the living-room floor.
“We were frustrated thinking of all these different solutions, and we got hungry,” Ms. Yanagishita said. “We went to have Korean food in a restaurant on 32nd Street. We were eating kimchi — pickled cabbage — and we noticed the raised platform we were sitting on.
“Then all the little pieces came together like a Japanese puzzle box: things slide out, things fold in, things tuck away. It is clean, we hope, without any fussiness.” ::New York Times and be sure to watch the ::slideshow.
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I have fallen in love with the idea of the raised platform. I have made sketches of one with storage built into it but like this idea much better. I had actuially considered building one for my apartment in sections so it could be moved.
I'm looking into building a small cabin. Emphases on small. This might help get the size down. Great post.
Reminds me of that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer has his guests sleep in drawers.
A friend of mine gave me the link to this article and I can't resist to post a comment... I lived in a quite small three bed room apartment, where the master bedroom was taken out in order to make the living room bigger, leaving me and my girlfriend with only two tiny bedrooms. So a bit over 2 years ago I got the exact same idea after a visit to Japan, and I realised the bed-under-the-dining-table idea right after.
The idea was only slightly different from the one in this article: I didn't make it an actual drawer, because in order to store the bed (un-)made with pillows and all, the front of what would be the drawer would have been to high to get into bed comfortably, and making the bed would be a bit of a problem. So I decided to get a curtain to keep the stored bed out of sight instead.
It was quite comfortable, thanks to a Porada cabinet we already owned we where able to turn the TV and dvd player 180 degrees and watch TV in bed, and if we had visitors and one of us decided to go to bed early we still had some sort of privicay thanks to a curtain panel system.
Some pictures of the living room around that time:
http://www.sternstudio.com/home
After two years we decided to move out. The bed idea was a good one, but we still needed a bigger appartment in the end, it didn't make the two bedrooms we had any bigger ;) Also: sleeping in the smell of your last supper wasn't all that....
My single-room apartment in Helsinki has such a hiding bed. Very convenient...
@ greatslack - I'm confused as to why a 3 bedroom apartment / 2 bedroom apartment with extra pull-out bed in the living room was too small for a couple.
Granted I live in NYC, where space is at a premium, but at the moment I temporarily have a 2 bedroom just to myself and feel like it's way too big and I need my roommate back just to feel like I'm not being a wasteful asshole.
I love the neat ideas shown in this article. Wonderful. Makes a small apartment huge and exceedingly livable. I also like Henri's apartment setup. Also quite nice.