Micro-living: small on space but big on ideas

Bigger is not better in housing anymore. It just doesn't seem right to be living large in opulent, resource-hungry properties - and with more of us choosing to squeeze into cities, it's not an option anyway.

What is achievable, and ultimately far more liveable, is an efficient, well-designed, small apartment. Where else but New York, one of the most densely populated cities on earth, to show us how?

The recent Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers exhibition of real life design solutions, which ran at the Museum of the City of New York, was sparked by a growing disparity between planning codes and actual need: currently, small apartments (defined as less than 400 sq ft) are prohibited in many areas of Manhattan, yet the reality is that one-third of all households are single people living alone - and this doesn't count the large number of singles forced to share, Friends-style, because of prohibitive housing costs.

Indeed, only 18 per cent of New York's housing is occupied by the so-called nuclear family (two parents, two children). To anyone who has lived in Hong Kong or Tokyo, this housing mismatch surely resonates.

Designers from around the world contributed ideas for strong design and smart living in futuristic micro-apartments, including Hong Kong's Gary Chang, of Edge Design Institute. His "Domestic Transformer" is a reinvention of a 344 sq ft Kowloon apartment, which once housed a family of six (Chang, his three siblings and their parents).

The exhibition's centrepiece was a furnished apartment of 325 sq ft by Pierluigi Colombo of Clei, an Italian company that designs transformable furniture. Just like Chang's metamorphic flat, Colombo's apartment featured furnishings that transform, tuck away, and reconfigure - a Murphy bed concealed in the wall behind the couch; a closet that swings out and a coffee table cocooning a complete set of stools - to leave the floor space open.