Melbourne apartments: Size isn't always everything, as these clever small designs show

 Architect Ben Edwards, adept at making super small studio apartments liveable and luxurious, was walking past a block of inner Melbourne flats when he saw an attached storage unit.

“It got me thinking: ‘What could I do with that to make that into a little apartment?'”

This is what tends to happen in the mind of someone who has made “putting big ideas into small spaces” one of the specialties of his Studio-edwards practise.

March Studio boss Rodney Eggleston doesn’t make a habit of doing minuscule living units. But as recent favours — to firstly his stepfather, for whom he fitted out a 46 metre long Couta boat The Jane for stylish and comfortable summer living, and then for his usual project painter Bob, for whom he repurposed a 27 square metre former toilet area in an ’80s Falls Creek chalet as a family weekender — he’s been exercised “by finding the opportunities in small spaces”.

“It’s not a typical project for us,” Eggleston explains. “It was a favour to Bobby, who bought the tiny warren for $30,000 and spent $100,000 fitting it out.”

The Bobhubski brings small living to the snowfields. Photo: Peter Bennetts

Because the resulting Japanese capsule hotel-like accommodation — with two bunks and queen-sized folddown bed — can be rented for a disproportionate return in peak ski season, the project now known as Bobhubski “will pay itself off in a few years”.

Edwards’ short-term rentable Microluxe units; the marble appointed one in Fitzroy, and the birch ply-lined one in North Fitzroy, both a shade over or under 20 square metres, may seem a tight fit for a modern lifestyle and certainly would challenge anyone used to lots of leg room.

Yet, with Victoria’s new apartment design rules that have no lowest scale restrictions beginning to manifest, they could become exemplary prototypes of micro apartments that are being marketed by developers to buyer groups they swear actually prefer living on a minor scale.

• Related: Apartment guide an exercise in compromise
• Related: Sally Capp on what Melbourne needs
• Related: Life in a 27sqm Sydney apartment

Certainly in Victoria, where the smallest of the small one bedroom stock does at least now require adequate storage, minimum 2.7 metre ceiling heights, and realistic natural light and ventilation throughout, are showing up as the only rationally affordable stock for many would-be first time property owners.

“Some want small footprints for environmental reasons. Some want small footprint units because they’re bigger than what they’ve experienced in their home countries,” Sally Capp, executive director of the Property Council of Victoria, says.

“For some, it’s a great entry into the property market. For some, especially the millennials, it suits their minimalist material needs. They don’t spend a lot on physical or material needs. They spend more on causes and travel and things that are important to them.

“Developers have been researching this market to understand it. And they know there is something in building small. But that doesn’t mean compromising on design quality.”

In the completed apartment buildings by the busy Evolve Development group, sales and marketing director Amanda Roper says the company has always included studios and one bedroom units of less than 50 square metres – the minimum unit size in NSW.

The Jewel development in South Melbourne; where small apartments sold out quickly. Photo: Dianna Snape

But, she adds, “good layout means that four burner cooktops, ovens and spaces for proper fridges – not bar fridges, plus a bedroom big enough for a Queen-sized bed that you can move around, does give people what they need”.

At the sold out Jewel project in South Melbourne, the one bedders were a roomy 47 square metres “with plenty of light”. They sold from $370,000 to both first- and second-home buyers. “These were the apartments that were the first to lease to people who want to be in a particular area … a suburb where the median house price is $1.5 million!”

One of the Jewel South Melbourne’s one bedroom apartments that sold at $375,000. 30 per cent of the building is this size. Photo: Evolve Development

In the snowfields capsule, Rodney Eggleston employed some of the tricks he’d learned in refitting The Jane.

“All the joinery was built in to maximise the feeling of space. A big light box above was a way of getting generous light into an area with only one window,” he says.

White helps Bobhubski feel larger than its actual tiny dimensions. Photo: Peter Bennetts

“We painted everything white to make it feel bigger, and in the same language as fitting out a boat or a caravan, we bought in curvature so you don’t bump into sharp edges. The doors are 500 mm wide and curved like the shape of a body rather than a rectangle.

“There are many ways of dealing with the issues in tight space to make it feel bigger than it is.”

Ben Edwards also knows living small means living with less. “You don’t buy loads of furniture, you build it in. And you have spaces and things with overlapping functions. But that can be exciting. Small doesn’t need to be boring.”

With fold-away furniture and furniture that goes into cupboards, Microluxe 2, in North Fitzroy, works on a tiny scale. Photos: Fraser Marsden 

Both his Microluxe units have fold-down beds “because you don’t want to be looking at a bed all day”. The woody North Fitzroy unit has stools and a table that come out of a cupboard in the daytime, plus a useful narrow window bench. The marbled and more central Fitzroy unit, with a pivot window out to the courtyard, has a bathtub just around the corner from its all-in living space.

Small “is the way for the next generation,” he believes. “It’s about being in the localities where they want to be and not having everything in their own house. The local park can be their garden. The local library can be their bookshelf, the local cafe their workspace.

Marble appointed Microluxe, in Fitzroy: tiny living on a grand scale. Photo: Fraser Marsden.

“We’re definitely starting to think about living in apartments in this city in a much more European way.”