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

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.

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 Murphey 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!

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.