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Getting a Big Apartment into a Small Space

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An imaginative design for a tiny apartment by Sub Estudio makes a small studio open and airy with the apparent scale of a much larger space.

The stairs to the mezzanine sleeping, bathing and workspace upstairs manages to look like a sculpture.

The duplex apartment is in a new building in Vila Madalena, an upper middle class neighborhood of the Pinheiros district in western São Paulo, Brazil.

One key to the versatility of the space is the sliding wall seen here.

These can separate off the TV room either from the kitchen, or from the living room space.

When they are open, the entire space is seen.

Upstairs, the top sections of what appear to be a dark grey rusticated steel artwork above opens to reveal what seems to be a spacious workspace.

When closed off, seen together with the spacious kitchen bench, the illusion of a much larger apartment is created.

Despite the tiny space, there is no attempt to skimp on the giant kitchen.

This is smart. You need to feel like you have uncluttered space to be able to cook after a typical stressful day of modern city life.

Feeding a bunch of dinner guests in this straightforward and honest space would be a breeze.

Cooking is a real activity, while curling up to watch TV is nearly virtual.

This fact is seldom used to allocate space well.

The workspace upstairs is similarly well thought out.

Even though, for space reasons, it’s really nothing more than a tiny shelf next to the bed, it feels big enough to think.

These stained steel shutters that close off the bedroom for privacy are what appears to be a giant art piece from the living room side.

As with the kitchen, the scale of the bathroom sink is far from poky. A minimal sculptural form in polished concrete, it’s bold and chic.

This is a very clever livable design that graciously makes a spacious apartment out of a much smaller space.

My only beef: since these doors all slide one way, the way typical closet doors do, it gives the game away.

If they had overlapped towards the center one, the illusion that this is just a decorative wall could be created.