Customer Reviews

Living Large in Small Spaces: Expressing Personal Style in 100 to 1,000 Square Feet

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As a studio apartment dweller, I'm drawn to books on living well in small spaces. I've found that many are aimed at those who own their own space and have unlimited budgets. While some of the apartments featured in this book clearly fall into that category, others are a bit more realistic, focusing on the renter who doesn't have the ability to knock out walls and raise ceilings. More of a 'this is what this person's apartment looks like' than a how-to or suggestion guide, I still picked up some good tips that will translate to my apartment. Many of the apartments featured do seem to lean more toward the modern look; FYI if you know that's not your thing.

I gave the book five stars because I think it does very well what the title suggests: it offers good photographs of different living spaces sized 100 sq feet to 1000.

I recently moved into a <600-sf house with my husband and 33-lb dog. My decorating skills are very minimal, and I end up doing most of my shopping at IKEA. And so it was a pleasant surprise to find this book, which I came across while browsing in the interior design section of a bookstore.

Of course, I had to force myself to pull it out and look at it, since I've been so immensely disappointed by almost all of the books on the subjects of "small" spaces (probably because most of these books define small as 1,000 to 1,999 sf) and since I'm interested in more than just pretty pictures.

Lo and behold, this book, which is largely wonderfully detailed photos of real people's real small spaces (including a 100-sf dorm room and 2 couples with babies living in less than 500 sf), is inspiring in the most practical sense of the word. It's reassuring just to know that other people in the universe reside in sub-1000-sf quarters.

While it is true that many of the featured small-space livers are artists/designers of some sort, with skills that the average Jane doesn't have, I see it less as a book whose ideas you'd want to copy and more of a book whose ideas you'd want to emulate, and I quickly found several good ideas I could apply to my own spaces. Plus, I'm not even half-done just going through it and absorbing the minutiae of each photo and each apartment.

The best part(s)? No fancy-schmancy lofts (with the exception of one converted factory space) and no excessive and gratuitous photos of Wolf ranges and Miele dishwashers.

I couldn't find it used, but I can't feel too much regret about buying it for full price.

This is far and away the best decorating book for small spaces I've read. It's 400 pages, with 400 photographs, and it explores 33 small homes from 100 to 1,000 square feet. My favorite aspect of this book is that the spaces presented are in the United States. I have found that most small spaces shown in specialty books are from Europe or Asia and so lots of the ideas don't translate too easily. The apartments/homes are presented in order of size. Each home contains a very readable description pointing out a wide variety of design ideas, decorating techniques and how each tenant achieved what he/she wanted in a home despite it's limitations. I'm so pleased I bought this book!

A small but pretty coffee table book with great content and some good ideas for living in tiny, tiny spaces.

1) 16 of the 33 profiled spaces were 500 sq ft or less! The other 17 were 600 - 1000 sq ft in size. I haven't seen many books on small space living that focus on this size range. Most books seem to present 2000 sqft houses as tiny.

2) The owners of these spaces didn't all have an unlimited budget. Many were in rentals so gut renovations, moving walls, etc was not an option. Many did have expensive or design worthy furniture and art but quite a few were heavily furnished with IKEA and thrift store finds.

3) Most of the owners had to be very carefull with clutter and picking pieces that would work in the space and that they really loved. Some of the other Amazon reviews found this to be somewhat unrealistic but I think that when you live in such small spaces, you are going to have to keep things very neat and tidy.

4) Part of the title is "expressing personal style". There is plenty of that in the book mostly clustered around what I'll call "modern" (eams etc), "drama" (red, red everywhere), "eclectic" (high design items mixed with garage sale items) and "standard" (danish). Many of the owners have extensive collections that are well presented and show off their unique personal style.

5) Most of these places are inhabited by: architects, artists, interior decorators, makeup artists, writers, curators, floral designers, etc. Essentially those who are in the "profession". I got the impression that hiring someone is de rigur if you are an accountant or fireman.

6) I liked the organization of the book by size of the space, architectural diagram of the space, lots of well shot photos, a narrative of who the residents are and how the space came to be and a picture of the residents.

7) One of my favorites were Francisco Parod and Ximena Orozco, the couple from Mexico living in a 450sqft NY apartment...with a baby! Not only did it look comfortable and open, they furnished almost everything at IKEA. My other favorite was Karen Meyer. She had translucent screens that could slide between the living room and dining room. This provided flexibility to the spaces by making it more expansive or more private, as needed. A murphy bed that was behind a shelf unit in the dining room could be opened up to create a guest room. A nice example of rooms doing double duty.

All in all, the best book I've found for realistic ideas for very small spaces.

I am enjoying this book immensely, unlike the four to five others I've picked up on this subject.

The apartments featured are very realistic - none of that "image expanding" so popular in decorating magazines like METROPOLITAN HOME or DWELL. Tiny spaces do indeed look their size - and that is a GOOD thing! It means we're not being sold a bill of goods by having the eye tricked with photography.

I appreciate the very quirky nature of the design of each of these highly individualized spaces. I appreciate even more the fact that they are grouped by square footage and start at the walk in closet size! <S>

There are many many highly usable and accessible decorating ideas on these pages.

The one fault of this book (and it's a minor one but worth mentioning): very many of the people profiled in the pages use their very small spaces as tricked out 'hotel rooms' rather than full time living quarters. This might not seem to matter until you realize one gentleman rehabbed his kitchen but didn't include an oven of any kind. How many of us can live like that full time? Several people have their places done up as glorified bedrooms w/ the beds on full time display. One or two others have complicated Murphy beds, one on pulleys from the ceiling. While fairly commonplace in New York proper these beds are expensive to duplicate almost anywhere else in the country and are key to several decorating schemes.

Other than these few problems I would highly recommend this book to anyone to learn some ingenius ways of solving small or quirky or differently arranged space problems!

Shy 400 pages this book lives up to its title and didn't disappoint me. Love that the author and photographer have included so many many examples of each square foot style abode, be it city or elsewhere. And an eclectic array of styles so that there are more than a few examples for just about anyones situation.

This is a great book for the person looking to change their environment as well as the person who is about to search for a new place to rent or buy, since the ideas given in the book can be filed in your head so when you are looking at places you can be asking yourself if what you liked in the book could be used in the new place.

Also loved the book because I am planning on building a small place and wanted some ideas and also wanted to be exposed to ideas and problems I had not even considered. The photographs are great. Not cute or fussy, but crisp and clean and well laid out.

At the back of the book there is a listing of the design professionals from the book. And I am in awe with what careful planning can do with a small place under 400 square feet. The book also makes you wince when you think of all the McMansions that people are building that are so wasteful per square footage.

This may be the best book out there right now on dealing creatively with small spaces. Most of the others I have seen feature gorgeous Manhattan or European lofts, or are the homes of architects and designers. They are eye candy, but not much help.

This book is quite inspiring, however. It's unfortunately short on sources, giving only a brief list of featured designers at the back, but the pictures are clear and the little accounts that go with them are written by the people who actually live in the apartments and they offer some useful ideas. And when a book acknowledges that some of us do live in less than even 1,000 feet, that's a book that's operating on a level of reality I can appreciate, because I live in 544 feet. Some of the apartments in the book are much smaller. I finally feel a little validated.

Another thing I like about it is that it's not a coffee-table- book size: it's manageable to hold and look through, even standing up. It is organized by size, from smallest to largest.

Definitely worth a look.

I didn't find the contents of this book inspiring enough to justify the $23.10 price tag. To its credit, the photographs are well-done, and you will start to think differently about making small spaces work. But I personally didn't walk away with any ideas for my small space, and I found the decorative styles of the apartment-dwellers interesting but not suitable for my lifestyle. A lot of the apartments featured are 2nd homes for people, so their apartments serve more as places to sleep rather than a dire need to live in <500 sq. feet. There's very little to no "how to" in this book, from furniture arranging tips to how to save space to how to make your life fit into 1 or 2 closets.

This book is my absolute favorite. Real people with real space concerns (i.e., 300 sqft for two adults and a baby), limited by realistic budgets, and who have learned to love who they are and incorporate their quirks into their space. Not a coffee table, idealistic lifestyle book advocating that we should throw out all of our knickknack collections and live ascetically. Beautifully, lovingly documented and photographed. Afterwards makes you feel rich for having so much space (compared to the New Yorkers) and hopeful about what you can do with the space you have.

I really like it that the floorplan for each place is included.
These really are small places, unlike some books that seem to think 2500 sq feet is small. Lots of New York City apartments but a sprinkling of other places. The stories about how each place evolved are interesting.

Most but not all of the places have had some major money spent on them, such as moving or constructing walls or special builtin furniture. But it gives lots of ideas even if you don't have that kind of money to spend right now. I love the diverse collection of spaces shown. The smallest ones are at the beginning of the book and by the time you reach the 800 sq ft places, they almost look like palaces by comparison.

For me the biggest drawback is that a too many of these places are second homes or the home of people who work in the city but also have a (larger) country place for weekends where they stash stuff or pay bills ...