Tiny Apartment Design

Ice Cube muses on LA’s Architecture and The Eames House (Case Study House #8)

Ice Cube personifies the LA I love: he’s an artist, a philosopher and a gangster. I love this video he did expounding on the beauty of what LA is and the beauty of the Eames House in the Pacific Palisades. The Eames House, as Ice Cube points out, used prefabricated walls and off-the-shelf factory windows. [...]

Tiny Apartment Living on a MASSIVE scale

December 21st, 2011

Have you seen these photos of high-rise living in Hong Kong? We’re talking high-rise living of a different magnitude.

Check out flickr.com/photos/magtravels

The sheer scale of buildings like these residential high-rises (36 of the world’s 100 tallest residential buildings are in Hong Kong) just make my head spin. Think of trash collection (do they have chutes that transport trash 50+ floors?), the laundry rooms, changing the lightbulbs in all those hallways.

It Never Ends!

It's hard to make that many units seem personal.

Could You Live in the Penthouse of One of These Towers? Could You Even Hang Out on Your Balcony Like These People? I'm Not Sure I Could Stand It.

I wanted to know what these apartments looked like on the inside. I did a little hunting on craigslist and the apartments remind me a lot of Manhattan apartments (with commission required and all!). They have the same small kitchens and rectangular living rooms with one large window. And the rents can be pricy, the apartment I found below rents for about $2,056 (US dollars) per month and is 600 square feet and two bedrooms. That was better than most of the other two-bedrooms, which were more often above $3,000. If you seek true urban living, these buildings seem like an adventure, an experiment in sociology and a physical improbability all at once.

Tiny design done well: it's light, bright and has a hint of color.

Ice Cube muses on LA’s Architecture and The Eames House (Case Study House #8)

December 11th, 2011

Ice Cube personifies the LA I love: he’s an artist, a philosopher and a gangster. I love this video he did expounding on the beauty of what LA is and the beauty of the Eames House in the Pacific Palisades. The Eames House, as Ice Cube points out, used prefabricated walls and off-the-shelf factory windows. The frame was constructed in two days. The home is integrated into the meadow landscape of the area. And it remains as quiet and dramatic a home as it was when it was completed in 1949.

Continued reading:

New York Times: Ice Cube on Eameses and his Hometown

The Eames House History

495 Square Feet Makes It ‘The Smallest New House in Echo Park’

November 17th, 2011

Did you see this home in the LA Times recently? Functional space is maximized and plenty of open windows makes this space look pretty fun to live in. Designer Louis Molina made the space very clean and almost industrial, which makes it feel larger than it is. Unadorned white cabinets abound. There is a noticeable lack of decorative items that look pretty but serve no purpose. I would have liked to see a more complete shot of the exterior of the home, but you can still get a pretty good idea of this tiny space with the full slideshow here.