A one-bedroom apartment is, on the surface, a project with modest pretensions. But being an apartment of little more than three meters wide and twelve meters deep, with a single window on its short side, it was not such an easy task.

This project was born from the desire of its owners to have a wide and open “day area”, which would allow them to have short and comfortable stays, in an apartment of 36 m2, when they are used to live in more than 150m2.

The design of a folding piece of furniture, containing the double bed, the bedside tables and the closet for hanging clothes, together with another 12-meter long piece of furniture that runs the length of the apartment, made this possible.

The opening and closing of the bed makes it possible to generate two domestic configurations: “night mode” and “day mode”. Each of them excludes the other, but the one that enables, develops in all its splendor: spatial amplitude, light, ventilation and functionality.

The result is a long and narrow tubular house that expands to the left to form a bathroom, kitchen and bedroom, while to the right a 12-meter long cabinet allows to store almost everything.

2:1 could be defined as an ultra-functional urban micro-dwelling, which configures “loose” spaces for living, working, sleeping, dressing, meeting with friends, within a space of 36 m2, with the only caveat that not all functions can be developed at the same time.

Two essential premises mark the roadmap of this type of projects, the first and most important: to count on the client’s complicity, because, although this domestic typology does not renounce to some basic standards of comfort and habitability, in many cases it means a lifestyle that avoids the usual patterns and relativizes the needs. The second premise involves discerning and simplifying the client’s programmatic priorities, which in these cases condition in a particularly significant way the tight design of the spaces.