Inside A 330-Sq-Ft NYC Apartment Designed For Under $5K | Small Spaces | Architectural Digest

Even though this apartment is just 330 square feet, I feel like I can fit my whole life into it. This main room is the dining room, it's the living room, it's the guest bedroom, it's a music studio, somehow a gym as well. I'm Phoebe Cutt, I'm the designer. And I'm Anton Frederiksen, and this is my 330 square foot apartment in Manhattan's Chinatown. So both Phoebe and I are from Vancouver, Canada. I was actually based in Vancouver when I received a unique job offer to come back to New York City. Finding a place in New York is tough, especially when you're not here already. I mean, with the budget I have, everything was on the smaller end. I was more solving for location. Living in New York City, it's an incredibly dynamic place. We're at the intersection of a couple different neighborhoods. Sometimes it feels like a bit of a box suite with these windows, and I can just stare out and see all the action happening. So this building was built with 1899-1900 turn of the century. Served many purposes. I have a photo here actually that we found looking at some New York City archives when they were constructing the subway. And you can see there's a hat maker, and actually in the space where we are right now, it was a dentist. The apartment instantly, you can see there's so many great architectural features. There's the high ceilings, exposed beams. There's the egg and dart motif kind of surrounding the window trim. When you showed me the space, we definitely knew we loved all the architectural details, but it was really important to keep everything multifunctional and multipurpose in such a small space. Because working with a more limited budget, we tallied up all the costs at the end. It was just under $5,000. Facebook Marketplace is a great place. A lot of DIYs and other secondhand things that we bought. We definitely wanted to have different zones, and this would be kind of your workstation, your dining, eating. There you can sleep and lounge and chill. But we also made sure to keep the space open because it is so small. Then you can make it really convertible. So even the coffee table we chose, it can be set up on the side like a little drink table for one person. It can be flipped down, and then that way you can put all your snacks and whatever for people. Yeah, everything definitely has to be very multipurpose in a small space. Welcome to the room. We are in the one and main room here, which is the dining room, the music studio, the gym, the living room, the guest room, the library. What else? The washing machine, the laundry room. Just a multipurpose space, really. Multipurpose space, yeah. So for every item that we brought in, we had to keep in mind the scale of the space, the proportion, the cost, obviously. But we wanted to have things also to be very timeless. For example, this is a tulip style table, but we actually found it off a secondhand marketplace site, and I think it was a few hundred bucks. But it's still real stone. And yeah, we definitely saved some money there. So this couch really fits perfectly in this space. We went with something that was modular and it's from Burrow. It actually also turns into a little sleeper couch. Yeah, so what I'll do when I have guests is I'll move these two over here, move this module there so you can stretch it out over, create a twin bed or a business class seat, if you will. These flip up, you roll out the mattress on top, a little mattress. Then these couch cushions act like a mattress and you can just put the sheets over. The two most expensive things in the apartment, probably the headboard and the sofa, but we still found ways to kind of keep the cost low. Then there was actually a site where I could purchase the returned item. So someone had already opened it and then returned it, but they couldn't sell it again in the store. You can get it at a discount and was able to assemble the design I wanted using the secondhand market. There's even space under the couch for more books and books hidden and every kind of nook and cranny. Every inch counts in a small space. Everything has to be used. Book overflow zone. And even this piano at one point was a couple skyscrapers of books as well. We found this piano, which perfectly fit this space on the wall. Yeah, I grew up playing piano and like composing my own music. And this is a way for me to de-stress after a long day at work. So I've done a lot of research on the exact model of piano that would work as a console as well. Quite expensive online, but was fortunate to find it on Facebook marketplace. And there was a couple looking to get rid of it quickly. And I think I got it for about $150. And then it can also turn into a mini home gym. Do you want this here? Put the bench there. Okay. Lie down. Hey, Phoebe, can you give me a spot? Oh my gosh. So even though everything is multi-purpose, it was really important that everything still feels curated and timeless. For example, this lamp we got, there were a lot of different options we were thinking about, but we settled on this lantern because it kind of echoes the bay here with the flower petals. Isn't it a kid's lamp too? Yeah, it's from Paul Rebarantine. So I think you were looking for this place maybe nine months? And I was actually about to give up. I had to drop some criteria along the way to open up more possibilities. So what really helped in the search was giving up on the in-unit washer dryer, but was able to find a portable option concealed under this nice skirt that Phoebe created. A little DIY. But actually we'll pull this out, put it into the bathroom, connect it with the shower hookup, and then do a load of laundry like that. The kitchen is surprisingly usable. You got a full stove and oven, even a little dishwasher. And then I like this kind of tea and coffee nook that I have here. Some more storage up top. Even a place for suitcase and ironing board and all that. Every storage space has been used. So the apartment came with a lot of great storage already, and most of that storage sits in the kitchen. So you'll see there's a lot more than just kitchen items being stored here. Yeah, there's like a skateboard up there. Speed skates. What else? We have a basketball above the olive oil. Anywhere where I could find a little bit of space I've used. Because there's no closets, there's really nowhere to put tall items like a broom or a vacuum. So we kind of just have to hide things also strategically. So the broom usually goes there. This is the bedroom. This is where I spend most of my time sleeping. This is a queen-size bed and there's just enough room to walk around the edges. And these floor-to-ceiling built-ins store mostly my clothing, shoes. There's actually a generous amount of storage for a small space. And the mattress for the guest bed lives in the attic right here. The bedroom started off as kind of a small white box. So to add a focal point, we started with the headboard first. And we didn't choose a bulky platform bed or anything because we really wanted to keep the walkways clear. That's also why we chose the sconces on the wall. I think we saw in some designer thing, took screenshots of it, reverse image searched it, found cheaper alternatives online. I think the sconces were about $30 each. And then just to add some movement and color, we did this little DIY bed canopy that also feels like you're camping in there. It's very cozy. Because we kept everything pretty low cost in the bedroom, then we could really have a focal point moment with this headboard, which was about maybe $1,000. So we built off of that. And the canopy was only about $80 that we did. I did a little DIY video showing people how I made this canopy with the help of Anton, obviously, because it's very high up. But basically, we just got two cafe curtain rods, hung them up, just draped the fabric over and the fringe. I just sewed it by hand. As many New Yorkers can relate to, I always had roommates before. So there were usually larger common areas. I knew I wanted to live alone. And with that came maybe a bit of a sacrifice on space. It was no other city in the world where you have this confluence of people and this density of people from so many different backgrounds really at the top of their game. So it's exciting things happening. Never know who you're going to meet, never know type of events you'll go to, or that serendipity or chaos kind of concentrated means that... It's worth having a small space here. There we go. I mean, I'm very happy. I don't need more space.