Maximizing Your Small Space

Organizing and interior design expert offers tips, strategies, and resources for bringing style and order to any space.

A comprehensive guide to small-space secrets and real-life solutions for living in 1,200 square feet or less. The Little Book of Living Small shows readers how to make the most of limited square footage—with grace and style—and serves as the cheerleader readers need to help themselves feel satisfied and proud of their choice to live with less. In addition to exploring both the motivation behind choosing to live in a small space, as well as the practical, everyday advice for managing a tight footprint, The Little Book of Living Small also includes case studies: 12 style-savvy, small-space dwellers open their doors and share their design secrets. Author Laura Fenton covers a range of homes including studio apartments, one- and two-bedroom houses, a tiny house, a co-living space, and even whole houses. Stylistically these homes range from urban, rural, minimalist, and country, with the unifying thread that they are all real homes of less than 1,200 square feet that offer clever solutions that readers can use in their own homes. Laura Fenton is the lifestyle director at Parents magazine. With more than fifteen years of experience, her work has appeared in major publications including Better Homes & Gardens, Country Living, Good Housekeeping, and on leading home websites including Remodelista.com, HGTV.com, ElleDecor.com, HouseBeautiful.com, Refinery29, and elsewhere. Through her writing she has explored the topic of living small for more than a decade. She lives small with her husband, a photographer, and their son in Jackson Heights, Queens, in New York.

Living in a small space is no excuse for cramped quarters or a lack of style. This handy guide provides instructions on making the most of available space and demonstrates how careful consideration and a unique approach can turn any room into a luxurious accommodation. Clever design strategies that clear up usable floor area and produce better spatial quality are included along with a slew of tried and tested ways to making a small space appear bigger through the use of decoration and furnishings.

You can enjoy an organized, beauty-filled life no matter what size your space is. In this practical book, you'll learn how to perform an audit of your space to see if it's functioning at its best, make the most of existing storage space and find clever ways to add more, find creative ways to arrange furnishings and accessories that maximize space and bring harmony and style to the home, and live graciously in a small space with others. Whether you're an empty nester who's downsizing, a newlywed setting up your first nest, or someone who just needs some creative new ideas, you'll love these strategies, tips, and solutions.

While we may admire the spacious rooms in large homes we see in magazines or on TV, let's face it: most of us don't live in rambling estates. Instead, we live in homes, apartments, or condos with small rooms and even smaller closets. But you can enjoy an organized, beauty-filled life no matter what the size of your space. In this practical book, readers will learn how to -perform a room-by-room audit of their space to see if it's functioning at its best -make the most of existing storage space and find clever ways to add more -find creative ways to arrange furnishings and accessories that maximize space and bring harmony and style to the home Whether empty nesters who are downsizing, newlyweds who are setting up their first nest, or anyone who needs creative new ideas, readers will love these strategies, tips, and solutions to maximize their space and enhance their quality of life.

Joel Beath and Elizabeth Price explore this question drawing inspiration from a diverse collection of apartment designs, all smaller than 50m2/540ft2. Through the lens of five small-footprint design principles and drawing on architectural images and detailed floor plans, the authors examine how architects and designers are reimagining small space living. Full of inspiration we can each apply to our own spaces, this is a book that offers hope and inspiration for a future of our cities and their citizens in which sustainability and style, comfort and affordability can co-exist. Never Too Small proves living better doesn’t have to mean living larger.

Interior design maven Whitney Leigh Morris makes living in under 400 square feet look elegant and effortless—even with a husband, baby, and two Beagles in the mix. In her debut book, Whitney shares her ideas and practices for making any tiny space efficient and stylish—whether it’s a rustic A-frame in the woods or a chic microapartment in the city. Featuring more than 200 tips for making the most of your little home, Small Space Style is the must-have, incredibly inspirational guide for living large in compact quarters. Join small space lifestyle expert Whitney Leigh Morris as she demonstrates how to keep clutter to a minimum, craft double duty layouts, personalize chic storage, go vertical when surfaces are limited, DIY clever custom built-ins, and even entertain a crowd within confined square footage. With chapters centered around the essentials—living, sleeping, eating, and bathing—Small Space Style features real-life examples from Whitney’s own delightful and sophisticated cottage in Venice Beach, California, as well as home tours of some of her favorite tiny houses, micro apartments, and beautiful, efficient small spaces.

Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Changing the Way We Think About Compact Houses Benefits of Compact Living Global Impact of Compact Living Chapter 2: Compact Living Basic Design Principles Chapter 3: Compact Living 101 Maximizing Floor Spaces Choosing Your Furniture Wisely Creating the Most Out of Your Space Conclusion Author Bio Publisher Introduction All over the world especially in Europe, therehas been a growing movement to promote compact cities. Compact cities are cities wherein the supermarkets, offices, hospitals, and other important places are set around one area. Through urban planning, compact cities are created in order to reduce the space used, to minimize emissions from extensive car use and to preserve more rural areas and green spaces. This movement acknowledges the fact that the world, more than ever is in need of space. Our population is continually growing far beyond seven billion and yet the Earth, in its finiteness, remains the same. Of all the infrastructures that have to use the Earth’s space, the largest portion comes not from the industries, but from our residential homes, apartment buildings and condominiums – our living spaces. In the United States, the houses get bigger each year. It was just less than 1700 sq. ft in the 1970s and has now gone up to 2500 sq. ft in 2014. What’s ironic here is that the families today are smaller than in the 1970s. In the United Kingdommeanwhile, the average one-bedroom house is merely 495 sq. ft or 46 sq. m and even a three-bedroom home is just 947 sq. ft on average. Yes, there is a huge gap between the US and the UK’s average housing spaces but believe it or not, there are many more countries with less and less square footage, and yet, survey shows that these people are not less satisfied. What I am trying to say is that space is merely a matter of how you use it. Let me ask, how many rooms in your house are not used that it ended up being a storage cabinet? Or how many useless things or non-working appliances do you have in your kitchen that you don’t dispose just because you don’t want your cabinets to look empty? There are probably many of you who have these unused spaces in your homes. The thing is, you could’ve grown vegetables with that space, it could’ve saved you dollars or it could’ve been use for something else. With the growing movement for compact cities and the rising of global awareness on sustainability issues, it is time for us to rethink how much square footage we really need in our homes. This is what compact living is all about - it is maximizing your limited house space for you to create more living spaces that you never imagined existing in your small home.